Nearly 100 million Americans use TikTok, a popular app for sharing short-form videos, every day, but Pennsylvania joined a growing number of states questioning the platform’s protections for young users.
“Today is an action rooted, very simply, in protecting children,” said state Attorney General Dave Sunday in a Tuesday press conference. “Social media allows us to be closer than ever to celebrities, athletes and musicians that we like. However, as easy as a child can watch (Dwayne) ‘The Rock’ (Johnson) make breakfast or hang out with his kids, they can see someone drinking alcohol or consuming drugs. And that is what is often glorified.”
Sunday alleges that TikTok “misrepresents its app as age appropriate for teens as young as 13,” even though content can include profanity, drinking, drug use and sexually suggestive situations.
“To achieve a 13-plus age rating in app stores, TikTok claims mature content is infrequent on their apps. Our investigation reveals that this could not be further from the truth,” said Sunday. “That age rating gives parents the illusion of safety, but actually opens the door to putting content literally in the palm of our kids’ hands whenever they want it.”
This mismatch violates Pennsylvania Consumer Protection Law, he continued.
Additionally, the app is “intentionally designed … to be addictive to young people,” Sunday said, in a way “that can deteriorate and decay a child’s mental wellness.”
“They want users to endlessly scroll while they rake in astronomical ad revenue,” he added. “When TikTok is constantly, infinitely in our kids’ viewstreams … we see TikTok as inhibitors of healthy adolescent development.”
According to the lawsuit, filed in the Court of Common Pleas for Allegheny County, “addiction is TikTok’s business model.”
“TikTok employs a number of harmful addictive-by-design features specifically targeted and tailored to exploit, manipulate and capitalize on the developing brains of young users,” the filing read. “Rather than disclosing its platform’s harms and potential harms to young users or their parents, TikTok misleads the public about the ways its platform has harmed — and is continuing to harm — children and teens.”
Sunday pointed to a teenTALK spring campaign that included student roundtable discussions across the state to analyze teenage relationships with social media. He described hearing about concerns with the enormously popular app, which an estimated 20% of American teenagers use “almost constantly.”
In-app tools to reduce screen time are ineffective and TikTok knows it, the suit continued. It also shared examples of content it investigated using a test account, with portions of the complaint redacted.
The commonwealth seeks an injunction that would prevent the app from violating consumer protection law — including age restrictions and verification safeguards — alongside civil penalties and fees.
In a statement to the Capital-Star, a spokesperson for TikTok said, “This lawsuit relies on misleading and inaccurate claims and deliberately ignores the concrete safety measures TikTok has voluntarily implemented to support the well-being of our community. Teen accounts have 50 preset safety, privacy and security settings built-in, and TikTok’s Family Pairing tools give parents direct control over screen time and content filters. We will vigorously defend against these claims.”
The bigger picture
Pennsylvania joins a list of states with pending cases against the social media platform, which used to be owned by Chinese company ByteDance and was forced to establish the American-majority owned TikTok USDS Joint Venture to comply with federal action. But Sunday’s suit appears to be the first filed since the transition, though he said “the ownership dynamic had nothing to do” with the timing.
Sunday took office in January 2025, saying he wanted to file lawsuits “that are thoughtful, that we have investigated ourselves (and) that we are in a position to stand by … that’s not something we can do overnight.”
At least two other states have sued over concerns about inappropriate content geared toward minors: Indiana and Utah. Both Nebraska and New Hampshire individually filed cases against TikTok alleging mental health harms — most of the above cases used state-level consumer protection laws to advance their claims, though none have been resolved.
More than a dozen other states (not including Pennsylvania or the above states), and the District of Columbia filed a coordinated suit in late 2024, claiming the app was addictive for young people. Those cases are still working their way through the legal process.
A release from Sunday’s office pointed to other agency efforts “to protect kids from modern technology that is developed and marketed without adequate consideration of the harm it is causing,” including letters to artificial intelligence companies about harmful chatbots and ongoing litigation against Meta.
He didn’t specifically mention other companies as targets for future action, but said “this is our first legal action like this … you will hear more from us in the near future.”
“The wellness, the mental well-being (and) the safety of our children is an absolute critical component of who we are as a society, and it is a cause that we will always fight for,” said Sunday. “That is exactly why we are doing this.”
