Montana famously became the first US state to announce plans to ban TikTok, although the company is fighting them. Now it has trouble brewing in another state.
Utah is suing TikTok with a triple-pronged attack claiming that it “illegally baits children into addictive and unhealthy use, blatantly misrepresents the app’s safety, and deceptively portrays itself as independent of its China-based parent company ByteDance”.
The lawsuit was announced by Utah’s governor Spencer J. Cox and attorney general Sean D. Reyes yesterday, with some suitably tubthumping rhetoric from both. “I’m tired of TikTok lying to Utah parents. I’m tired of our kids losing their innocence and even their lives addicted to the dark side of social media,” said Reyes. “TikTok will only change if put at legal risk—and ‘at risk’ is where they have left our youth in exchange for profit and greed.”
The Utah news follows lawsuits from Indiana (in December 2022) and Arkansas (in March 2023) as well as the ban battle in Montana.
Update: TikTok provided a statement to Associated Press:
“TikTok has industry-leading safeguards for young people, including an automatic 60-minute time limit for users under 18 and parental controls for teen accounts. We will continue to work to keep our community safe by tackling industry-wide challenges,” TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek said.
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