Utah became the latest state Tuesday to file a lawsuit against TikTok, alleging the company is “baiting” children into addictive and unhealthy social media habits.
TikTok lures children into hours of social media use, misrepresents the app’s safety and deceptively portrays itself as independent of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, Utah claims in the lawsuit.
“We will not stand by while these companies fail to take adequate, meaningful action to protect our children. We will prevail in holding social media companies accountable by any means necessary,” Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit, which was filed in state court in Salt Lake City.
Yeah…Isn’t this likely unconstitutional given the first amendment? This strikes me as somewhat similar to attempts to regulate video games “for making children violent” or the like. At best this may result in TikTok releasing a children’s variation of the app with greater restrictions in terms of use and content, supposing something like that doesn’t already exist.
Similar to how YouTube has a variation of their app for children, if I remember right.
At some point, the US made it illegal to grow or consume a plant. That seems like it would be impossible to handle legally, but it was made into law.
If objective guidelines can be made on what constitutes damaging behavior, it’s possible that it could have legal ground to stand on. I hate tiktok because it takes away so much of my wife’s time. I play Xbox, though, so it’s not like I don’t have habits that eat up time. I remember my grandma complaining about my grandad fishing. She said she saw him more before he retired.
Yeah, the only difference from the violent video games thing is that people on sites like this one hate tik tok (or any other social media except the one they use) and like video games.
Like, what, they made their app too entertaining? That comment about their sibling spending all day on tik tok is exactly what many people do with video games. But I bet if you say “we’re gonna ban any video game that’s too fun because you’ll play them all day”, then all the tik tok haters will be like “but that’s different!”