Arizona sues TikTok for 'intentionally addicting minors'

"Defendants' own internal studies demonstrate that users including Arizona minors feel addicted to TikTok,'' says the lawsuit filed Thursday in Maricopa County Superior Court by Attorney General Kris Mayes. "Defendants have taken no action to make the platform less addictive.''

Mayes also contends TikTok has a business strategy designed to purposely addict minors. She said it "has caused widespread and significant injury to Arizona minors and to Arizona consumers generally.''

If all that sounds familiar, it's because the Arizona litigation comes exactly two years after more than a dozen states filed their own lawsuit alleging the company deliberately designed the platform to keep teens hooked on the service. That case is still pending.

On Thursday, Richie Taylor, spokesman for Mayes, would say only that Arizona "wasn't in a position'' two years ago to become part of that lawsuit. It is too late now for Arizona to join the previous suit.

That means Mayes has to make the case on her own that TikTok violates Arizona's Consumer Fraud Act.

That law allows her to ask a judge to issue restraining orders against company officials from engaging in what she says are deceptive practices and fraud. Mayes also wants a judge to order the company to refund any money it got through illegal practices and surrender any profits it made through illegal practices.

There was no immediate response from TikTok about the new lawsuit.

Richie declined to comment on whether the timing of Thursday's filing is in any way linked to the upcoming November election, in which Mayes, a Democrat, seeks reelection against Republican challenger Warren Petersen.

Disputes claim of improved safety features 

TikTok defended its practices after the earlier multi-state lawsuit was filed. It says it has adjusted safety features.

But Mayes, in the new lawsuit, says the company misrepresented the safety features to families — to the extent that there even were such features.

"In reality, none of TikTok's safeguards are meaningful counterbalances to the real and profound harm caused by the design elements (of the platform), and TikTok knows this to be true,'' the lawsuit states.

Mayes said TikTok is popular with Arizonans who are minors. She said the company's own records show an average of more than 543,000 Arizona minors used the platform per month between April 30, 2022 and Dec. 31, 2023.

She said the company tracks users in various ways, including session duration, sessions by hour of the day and age group. That information, according to the lawsuit, is being used "to make the platform appealing to even more Arizona residents.''

That also has allowed TikTok, which does not charge users, to sell advertising aimed specifically at Arizona consumers.

All that relates to Mayes' claims that the company uses the information it gathers about users and their habits to make the platform more attractive and take advantage of the fact that "minors do not have executive function to control their screen time.''

"Defendants are aware that young users are particularly vulnerable to addictive design features and have employed sophisticated principles of psychological manipulation,'' the lawsuit states. "These principles are manifested through design elements which function autonomously throughout the platform, promoting compulsive use among all users while disproportionately affecting minors.''

Consider, Mayes said, the "infinite scroll'' mechanism in which users are shown an endless feed of videos of variable content and quality.

"Users cannot predict what content will come next or how interesting it will be, so a user interacting with the infinite scroll mechanism will be rewarded at unpredictable intervals with pieces of content they find occasionally funny, entertaining, or otherwise interesting,'' she said. According to the lawsuit, that enables users to pursue "the next unpredictably rewarding piece of content without requiring the user to consider the action or to make a conscious choice.''

The scroll, an "auto play'' and "for you'' features, are "profoundly — and intentionally — addicting to young users including Arizona minors," the lawsuit says. 

The attorney general also said some content is "ephemeral,'' only available on a temporary basis, such as live features. That can create anxiety through FOMO — fear of missing out — fueling a desire by young people to "compulsively and continuously log on to the platform'' so as not to miss anything, she wrote.

Mayes, in a separate prepared statement, said all that undermines any claims by the company to parents that TikTok is safe for their children.

"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,'' she said. "It's unconscionable.''

Previous settlement with Meta 

This isn't Mayes' first outing against social media.

Arizona and a coalition of other states secured a $17.1 billion nationwide settlement with Meta earlier this year over complaints about the addictive design of the company's products, Instagram and Facebook. Arizona's share of that is $223 million.