TikTok has been sued by the US state of Iowa for allegedly misleading parents about the safety of children on the popular short-video platform.
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, accuses TikTok of lying to parents about being a safe platform for users under the age of 13 and beyond. The complaint says TikTok allowed children widespread access to inappropriate content and misrepresented the levels of safety on the app, violating the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act.
“TikTok has kept parents in the dark,” says Iowa’s Attorney General Bird in a press statement. “It’s time we shine a light on TikTok for exposing young children to graphic materials such as sexual content, self-harm, illegal drug use, and worse.”
TikTok downplayed the severity of the content posted on the platform and managed to get around parental controls, the complaint adds. It further accuses the popular social media app, which is owned by the Chinese tech conglomerate, ByteDance, of “keeping parents in the dark”.
According to the statement, TikTok claims a 12+ rating in Apple’s app store, but it continues to host what the attorney-general calls “intense adult content”. This includes “sexual content and nudity”, “profanity and crude humor”, “mature and suggestive themes”, among others.
The lawsuit alleges TikTok’s rating on the app store is wrongful and that it “violates App Store guidelines by saying harmful content is ‘infrequent/mild’ when it is actually ‘frequent/intense’. The complaints also accuses TikTok of recommending “inappropriate” content to children under 13 years of age.
