Nevada AG Scores Legal Victory Against TikTok

Nevada Attorney Aaron Ford scored a major legal victory in the Nevada Supreme Court against TikTok. Last year, Ford filed a lawsuit against the social media company alleging that the platform was harming young users through manipulative, addictive, and dangerous features. Despite TikTok’s efforts to block the lawsuit, the Nevada Supreme Court’s decision allows Ford’s case to proceed to trial.

In the complaint, AG Ford alleges TikTok, Snapchat and three Meta-owned platforms, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger have encouraged problematic internet usage and caused young people harms to mental health, body image, physical health, privacy, and physical safety.

The complaint further alleges:

All of these platforms use features like endless scrolling, dopamine-inducing rewards, disappearing content, likes, shares, push notifications, and other elements to maximize youth use, manipulate young emotions, and exploit children’s developing minds — all for massive financial gain.

All five of these platforms are enormously popular with young people, and all five are alleged to have sizeable populations of teen users. Further, each platform is alleged to have a large percentage of users under the age of 13, the legal age cutoff for these types of apps. Each of these platforms has also been linked to serious dangers to kids, including auto accidents, increases in drug overdoses, suicides, eating disorders, sexual exploitation and more.

“My commitment to protecting consumers, particularly those that are as vulnerable as our youth, is unwavering,” said AG Ford. “Bringing this litigation is an important step toward ensuring social media platforms put our children’s safety before their profits. I look forward to working closely with our partners to protect the youth of our state,” Ford said at the time of the filing.

The Nevada Supreme Court ruled that the Clark County District Court has jurisdiction in the case and determined that the social media company’s collection of personal user data and the sale of that information to third party advertisers is reliant on “capturing the users’ attention.”

“While operating a website accessible in many states in and of itself does not constitute express aiming, TikTok’s interactive social media business model depends on capturing users’ attention in order to collect demographic and behavioral data that it then sells to third-party advertisers,” the court wrote.

Additionally, the court found that Section 230 of the federal Communication Decency Act doesn’t provide blanket immunity for social media companies who design harmful products. Ford alleges TikTok was designed to manipulate young users, causing harms related to mental health, body image and privacy. “The State alleged and supported with evidence that TikTok knew of and pursued its market success in Nevada and that young users have struggled with limiting their TikTok use due to the at-issue design features,” the court wrote.

“TikTok has failed in its effort to evade justice in Nevada’s courts. Again. As this case continues, I am confident my office will prevail,” said Ford. “We will never stop working to hold social media companies accountable for the harm they have done to Nevada’s youth.”