Ticking down — The states take aim at TikTok

Last week, 14 state attorneys general, including New York AG Tish James, sued the social media platform TikTok for allegedly damaging young users’ mental health and collecting information about them with its service in violation of state and federal laws.

Where once this type of action would have been eye-popping, it’s become somewhat routine in the last several years as the general goodwill for big tech and social media — once hailed as an endgame innovation to fix all manner of social problems — curdled into distrust. Similar lawsuits have targeted Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, and Google, parent of YouTube, among other companies.

This is for good reason; these companies now arguably have more global influence than most countries. They operate as effectively international public squares and media platforms, with internal rules and practices that govern how billions of people perceive reality and shape their understandings.

As we’ve seen in recent years, this immense influence and a general hands-off approach to oversight have not combined well. Platforms have been exploited to spread and cement everything from political propaganda by foreign states to climate change misinformation to vaccine skepticism to pro-anorexia content and non-consensual explicit material often targeted at and involving teens.

Practically speaking, it is all but impossible to fully moderate platforms of billions of users in multiple languages in a way that heads off all these potential harms, but that doesn’t mean these companies haven’t made poor choices that made things worse.

While a lot of hand-wringing over TikTok has focused on its Chinese ownership, that’s not the issue here, but rather the fact that it’s aggressively targeted minors and gathers reams of data about them. The platform is practically built to be addictive, with the endless scroll of video autoplay and its penchant for viral soundtracks and trends pinging off each other.

A staggering 58% of all teens 13 to 17 say they are daily on TikTok, with about a fifth saying they use the app “almost constantly.” Whether the app likes it or not, it has a huge responsibility to them, especially as teen mental health experiences precipitous declines.

It’s worth emphasizing that this doesn’t mean that the entire issue of a decline in teen mental health can be fully laid at the feet of TikTok or any other social media platform; the issue is too complex and consists of too many variables. Post-COVID, teens are suffering from extreme polarization, climate change fear, economic uncertainty and myriad other factors. But social media does often have a tendency to amplify these factors, making them feel inescapable or all-encompassing, a force multiplier for despair just as it can be a positive tool for organization and building community.

Lawsuits are not always a panacea, and we won’t say as a matter of course that every remedy sought by lawmakers, regulators and the AGs is ideal. But forcing these companies to face accountability is generally a good thing, just as it’s been helpful to shed additional light via diligent reporting, advocacy, whistleblowers and congressional inquiry, among other avenues. There’s a happy medium to be reached, which requires some push-pull from companies that are pretty used to doing things their own way.