You may have seen the news yesterday about 14 attorneys general filing lawsuits against TikTok. It was covered in a bunch of places, including Reuters, CNBC, the NY Times, the Washington Post, NPR, CNN and more. And, bizarrely, none of them seemed to include links to any actual complaint. It took me a little while to realize why. Partially it’s because the mainstream media often doesn’t link to actual complaints (though a lot of the sources named here are normally better about it). But more likely the issue was that this wasn’t “14 attorneys general team up to file a lawsuit” like we’re used to. It was “14 AGs coordinated to file individual lawsuits in their home state courts, alleging the same thing.”
We’ll get into a bit more detail shortly about what’s in the lawsuit, but the summary is “kids use TikTok too much, so your features that kids like must be illegal.” It’s really that simplistically stupid.
And it’s actually fifteen AGs, because on Friday, Ken Paxton also filed a case against TikTok that has some similarities. This suggests that the organizers of all these cases approached Paxton to join in. Then, like the total asshole he is, he decided to file a few days early to try to steal the thunder.
So, anyway, here are thirteen of these complaints. I am providing them here, despite the fact that Techdirt’s entire budget probably doesn’t cover the cost of coffee in the newsrooms of all of the publications listed above who refused to do the work that just took me quite some time.
Just something to think about when you consider which kinds of news orgs you want to support. It’s thirteen instead of fifteen because (1) Oregon hasn’t actually filed its yet, and says it will sometime today (a day after the rest), but it wasn’t available as I was writing this and (2) Kentucky doesn’t seem to have put out a press release about its filing (every other state did).
Anyway… it’s not worth going through all the complaints other than to note that most of them are quite similar and can be summed up as “TikTok made a product kids like to use, and we’re sure that violates consumer protection laws somehow.”
I’ll pick on New York’s filing out of the batch because it lays out the contents of the argument in a way that’s easy to see and recognize that they’re literally saying “oh, providing features users like is getting kids to use the site more.”
This goes on for another couple pages, but it doesn’t get much better. There’s a heading that “journalists have reported on the harms on TikTok for years.” Which does not mean that TikTok is liable for kids doing stupid shit on TikTok. You would think that these high powered lawyers would also know that journalists aren’t always entirely accurate?
But just looking at the parts above, this lawsuit is laughable. First of all, any business’s focus is to try to maximize customers’ use. That’s… capitalism. Are all these states saying that restaurants that serve good food are violating consumer protection laws by getting people to want to come back frequently?
Again, features that people like are not illegal. We don’t let government decide what features go in software for good reason, and you can’t do that just because you claim it’s a consumer protection issue with no actual evidence beyond whims.
As for the TikTok challenges, that’s not TikTok doing it. It’s TikTok users, and such challenges have long predated TikTok and many of the reports of viral TikTok challenges are the media falling for myths and nonsense. Blaming TikTok for challenges is not just weird, it’s legally incomprehensible. Years ago such challenges would get sent around via email or Usenet forums or whatever. Did we sue email providers? Of course not.
That last section is also scientific nonsense. The Surgeon General’s report makes it quite clear that the scientific evidence does not say that social media is inherently harmful to mental health. And, no “social media addiction” is nothing like substance addiction, which is literally a chemical addiction.
These lawsuits are embarrassing nonsense.
If you file a lawsuit, you have to explain your cause of action. You don’t get to just say “infinite scroll is bad, therefore it violates consumer protection laws.” Notably in the NY complaint it’s 64 pages of screaming about how evil TikTok is and only gets to the actual claims at the very end, with basically no explanation. It just vaguely states that all of the stuff people are mad about regarding TikTok violate laws against “fraudulent” and “deceptive” business conduct.
Honestly, these cases are some of the weakest lawsuits I’ve ever seen filed by a state AG.
In many ways, they’re quite similar to the many, many lawsuits filed over the last couple of years against social media companies by school districts. Those were embarrassing enough, but at least I could understand that those were filed by greedy class action plaintiffs’ lawyers hoping to get a massive payday and not caring about the actual evidence.
Elected officials file these cases using taxpayer money. For what? Well, obviously for election season. Every single one of these AGs is at least a good enough lawyer to know that the lawsuits are absolute fucking garbage and are embarrassing.
But golly, it’s one month from election day. So why not get that press release out there claiming that you’re “protecting kids from the evils of TikTok”?
It’s cynical fucking nonsense. All of the Attorneys General involved should be ashamed of wasting taxpayer money, as well as valuable court time and resources, on such junk. There are plenty of legitimate consumer protection issues to take up. But we’re wasting taxpayer money because TikTok has a “for you” feed that tries to recommend more interesting content?
Come on.