Attorney General Mayes Sues TikTok for Harming Arizona Youth

PHOENIX – Attorney General Kris Mayes today announced the filing of a consumer‑protection lawsuit against TikTok Inc. and related entities. The complaint alleges widespread violations of the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act stemming from the company’s design, marketing, and concealment of features that addict and endanger Arizona children and teens.

The complaint alleges that TikTok engineered its social media platform to maximize compulsive use among minors—including children under age 13—by deploying manipulative design tactics, including infinite scrolling, auto play, reward loops featuring harmful content, social‑comparison metrics, push notifications, and harmful appearance‑altering filters. Attorney General Kris Mayes alleges that these features were created to attract young users and keep young users engaged for as long and as often as possible so that TikTok could profit from their data.

“We allege that TikTok has repeatedly and knowingly violated the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act by designing one of the most addictive products ever targeted at children—and by concealing the severe mental, physical, and emotional‑health risks these design choices create,” said Attorney General Mayes. “TikTok touts its supposed safety measures to convince parents that this product is safe for young people. But behind the company’s marketing is a platform engineered to exploit the vulnerabilities of developing brains, pushing Arizona kids toward compulsive use, harmful content, and dangerous behaviors while failing to protect them from adults who use the social media platform to groom or solicit minors. It’s unconscionable.”

 The lawsuit, filed today in Maricopa County Superior Court, asserts that TikTok exposes Arizona minors to a range of serious harms that the company actively minimized or failed to disclose. These include increased risks of depression, anxiety, sleep disruption, disordered eating, body‑image distress, and self‑harm. The complaint further alleges that TikTok’s recommendation algorithms expose minors to increasingly extreme, harmful, or age‑inappropriate content and that TikTok’s content‑moderation practices are inadequate to block much of the dangerous material on the platform.

The State also alleges that TikTok knowingly permits extensive under‑13 use of its platform, despite publicly claiming to bar such users, and alleges that TikTok’s design and moderation failures enable child sexual exploitation, including the circulation of child sexual abuse material through “post‑in‑private” accounts promoted by the platform’s algorithm.

A review of TikTok’s practices allegedly shows that the platform is intentionally constructed to appear user‑friendly and safe, an impression bolstered by:

• TikTok’s failure to disclose the risks of addiction, compulsive use, mental‑health injury, sleep disruption, and other harms associated with its design elements.
• TikTok’s public representations that it prioritizes teen safety and wellbeing.
• TikTok’s marketing of ineffective safety tools, such as a “60‑minute screen time limit,” which the company allegedly knew would not reduce minors’ usage.
• TikTok’s withholding of safety features from some users, and use of “placebo” testing in which it misrepresents the existence of safety features to some consumers.

“Arizona’s children are paying the price for TikTok’s pursuit of profit. We will not tolerate a global corporation putting our kids’ health, privacy, and safety at risk in order to increase advertising revenue,” said Attorney General Mayes. “This lawsuit, like the landmark lawsuit against Meta, is necessary to stop TikTok’s unlawful practices, hold the company accountable, and protect Arizona families from further harm.”

If you believe you or your child has been a victim of consumer fraud or unfair practices, you can file a consumer complaint by visiting the Attorney General’s website at www.azag.gov/consumer. If you need a complaint form sent to you, you may contact the Attorney General’s Office in Phoenix at (602) 542‑5763, in Tucson at (520) 628‑6648, or outside the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas at (800) 352‑8431.
 
A copy of the complaint is available here.