Arkansas Sues TikTok, Meta For ‘Pushing Addictive Platforms’

Arkansas has filed lawsuits against Chinese-owned social media app TikTok and Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, over concerns over the platforms’ “addictive” nature and the effects that they are having on children.

One lawsuit was filed against Meta, while two were filed against TikTok and its China-based parent company, ByteDance.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) announced the lawsuits in a press release on Tuesday.

“We have to hold Big Tech companies accountable for pushing addictive platforms on our kids and exposing them to a world of inappropriate, damaging content,” she wrote.

The governor also discussed the lawsuits during an appearance on Fox News with host Jesse Watters.

The state’s attorney general, Republican Tim Griffin, also spoke out about the news — stating that all three lawsuits have the common theme of “deception.”

Griffin went on to note that Arkansas’ lawsuit against Meta centers around how the social media company uses “algorithms that are addictive to adolescents and are rewiring how our children think, feel and behave” while also hiding “the nature of their products in pursuit of profits and growth.”

According to the attorney general, the first lawsuit against TikTok and ByteDance focuses on how the social media app is marketed as being “appropriate for teenage users” while at the same time “offering an abundance of posts that contain mature themes, nudity, and drugs” — noting that all of that inappropriate content is “readily available to minors.”

The state’s second lawsuit against the Chinese-owned social media companies targets an issue that has been at the center of recent controversy — the platform’s claim that the Chinese Communist Party has no access to Americans’ user data, despite the fact that Chinese law forces any Chinese-based company to cooperate with the government’s intelligence activities.

This false claim has been discussed in recent congressional hearings as lawmakers debate banning TikTok in the United States, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle voicing concerns about the security risks posed by the Chinese-owned app.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew appeared before Congress to testify about the social media app, where he did not deny that TikTok had the ability to spy on its American users.

The CEO was also asked about reports that TikTok had spied on journalists — and rather than denying or explaining the information in those reports, he responded: “I disagree with the characterization that it was ‘spying.’”