PHOENIX — Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sued TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, on Thursday, accusing the company of designing its app to hook children and hiding the risks from families, KTAR News reported.
The lawsuit, filed in Maricopa County Superior Court, cites company records showing an average of about 543,000 Arizonans under 18 used TikTok each month from spring 2022 through 2023, and says TikTok considered Arizona a “top market.”
The complaint says features such as endless scrolling, autoplay, frequent notifications and beauty filters keep young users on the app to boost ad revenue. It also accuses TikTok of promoting safety tools it knew didn’t work, including a 60-minute daily limit teens can bypass with a passcode, and of allowing children under 13 on the app.
The state is asking for consumer refunds and civil penalties.
Sources: KTAR News. Thee Arizona Times uses AI-assisted reporting reviewed against the sources listed.
Photo: Solen Feyissa / CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
