Nebraska Sues TikTok For Claiming To Be Family Friendly
Another day, another dumb lawsuit against TikTok.
We’ve seen school districts and parents suing TikTok on the basis of extremely weird claims of “kids used TikTok, some bad stuff happened to kids, TikTok should be liable.”
But in the past year, it seems that a bunch of state AGs have decided to sue TikTok as well. I’ve lost track, but in the last year or so, I believe Arkansas, Indiana, Utah, Kansas, and Iowa have all sued TikTok using some theory or another about how “kids like this app” must violate some law. It’s impossible to keep up with the state of all of these lawsuits, though I know that Indiana’s lawsuit was tossed out, though somehow Arkansas’ lawsuit has been allowed to proceed.
Perhaps buoyed by the success in Arkansas, Nebraska has also jumped into the state fray, suing TikTok for being “deceptive” in claiming the platform is family friendly. You can read the full complaint here or embedded below.
Like the other lawsuits, this one is a hodgepodge of moral panic and conspiracy thinking. It has all the hits: mental health! eating disorders! suicide! China!
But the key to the complaint is that by saying that it’s a family friendly app, while the moral panic narrative says “bad things happen to kids on TikTok,” it allows Nebraska’s AG to claim that this is a “deceptive” practice by the company:
Despite such documented knowledge, Defendants continually misrepresent their platform as safe and appropriate for kids and teens, marketing the app as “Family Friendly” and suitable for users 12 and up, reassuring parents, educators, policymakers, and others….
Of course, the end result of nonsense lawsuits like this is that no website will ever do anything in the future to try to be “family friendly” again, because if something bad then happens, AGs will go hog-wild in suing.
It’s so incredibly misdirected and short-sighted.
Like all the others, this is really a lawsuit about politicians not liking the content on TikTok, not liking that the kids these days like TikTok, and not liking that TikTok happens to be partially owned by a Chinese company.
But they can’t quite come out and say that, so they have to come up with some nonsense way of bringing these lawsuits. “Omg, we have to protect the children” appears to be one of the more popular ones, despite the near total lack of any evidence of any inherent harm in TikTok (or other social media) on kids.
Yes, some kids are suffering from mental health problems. And yes, there are some discussions on TikTok that are disturbing. But most of that disturbing content remains protected speech under the First Amendment. Just because people with mental health challenges use TikTok does not mean that TikTok magically causes those mental health challenges.
Like so many state AG cases, this whole thing is really about grandstanding by the AGs who hope to be elected the next governor or senator of their state.
This is yet another example of why KOSA is so dangerous. It empowers state AGs to sue websites in new ways. The state AGs have made it clear with most of these lawsuits that they don’t care what’s actually happening or what actually makes sense. They want to get headlines for taking on the big bad Chinese company that is poisoning our kids’ minds… so that they can get headlines and name recognition to line them up to run for higher office.