US state Indiana’s Attorney General Todd Rokita has filed two separate lawsuits against TikTok, accusing the popular short-video platform of misleading people about the safety of user data and exposing children to mature content.
The regulatory scrutiny around TikTok and the company’s data-sharing practices has been mounting. Earlier this week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered a ban on TikTok on devices issued by the government, expressing concerns over the threat of foreign actors “gaining access to critical U.S. information and infrastructure”.
“This TikTok ban extends to all state-issued cellphones, laptops, tablets, desktop computers, and other devices capable of internet connectivity, and it must be strictly enforced,” Governor Abbott had said.
Several other states, including South Dakota and Maryland, had already banned the use of TikTok on government-issued devices before Texas.
“The TikTok app is a malicious and menacing threat unleashed on unsuspecting Indiana consumers by a Chinese company that knows full well the harms it inflicts on users,” AG Rokita said in a statement. “With this pair of lawsuits, we hope to force TikTok to stop its false, deceptive, and misleading practices, which violate Indiana law.”
The first lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday and concerns minors, alleges TikTok lures children by making misleading claims that it is friendly for audiences aged between 13 and 17 years. However, they are exposed to potentially harmful content, including media that contains drugs, nudity, and foul language. Such exposure can influence the behaviour of children negatively, claims the lawsuit.
“TikTok is actively exposing our children to drug use, alcohol abuse, profanity and sexually explicit material at a young age,” said AG Rokita. “TikTok is deceiving Indiana parents.”
The second lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday, accuses TikTok of possessing ‘reams” of highly sensitive as well as personal information on consumers in Indiana. TikTok “has deceived those consumers to believe that this information is protected from the Chinese government and Communist Party”.
According to the lawsuit, TikTok’s privacy policy for Europe was updated “to clearly state that it permits individuals outside of Europe, including China, to access European user data” but the social media giant has “made no such update to its U.S privacy policy, which applies to Indiana consumers, explicitly informing them that their data is accessed by individuals and entities in China”.
TikTok’s data-sharing practices have been the focus of scrutiny and debate in the US. Policymakers are showing concerns that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, could be pressured by the Chinese government to hand over data of millions of US users.
