You can add Louisiana to the list of states suing TikTok. In separate lawsuits, more than a dozen states and the District of Columbia are accusing the app of deceiving the public about the dangers of using it. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill says TikTok is intentionally peddling adult content to kids.
“We’ve got a lot of evidence showing that the app is not appropriate for kids that are twelve and thirteen and fourteen years old. A lot of inappropriate, and even illegal, material is being pushed to kids of that age,” Murrill said.
Murrill says the lawsuit is not about the content itself – it’s about TikTok’s intentional lack of action to prevent that material from being accessible by kids.
“This is driven by algorithms, and you really have to age-gate the material and get into a more sophisticated kind of restriction on the platform if you want to keep a lot of this material from reaching young kids,” Murrill explained.
And Murrill claims in her lawsuit that this is being done on purpose.
“What we’ve seen is that content that we would consider to be not legally permissible for a twelve-year-old is being peddled through this algorithm to a twelve-year-old,” Murrill said.
Along with forced changes to the algorithms, Murrill is seeking fines, penalties and other costs in her suit. This is not a partisan issue; these lawsuits have been filed by both Republican and Democratic attorneys general. New York and California are leading the coordinated effort. TikTok has strongly denied the allegations.
