Is TikTok harmful to youth? States say yes, and they’re suing

Hey fam, 

Did you hear that more than a dozen U.S. states, including the District of Columbia, are suing TikTok? The lawsuits claim that the popular short-form video sharing app is addictive to kids and harms their mental health. Even U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has urged Congress to require TikTok to place a warning label on its platform, noting that adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face “double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms,” as Black Voice News reported earlier this year.

However, in his New York Times op-ed, the surgeon general made it clear that “a warning label would not, on its own, make social media safe for young people.”

So what would make social media safer for kids and how should we make sense of the national lawsuit and its implications moving forward?

First, we should consider how people are using TikTok. 

Some insight comes from URL Media partners like Parlé Magazine, a digital lifestyle brand known for evergreen culture stories. Earlier this summer, Parlé featured Jools Lebron, who went viral on TikTok with her tongue-in-cheek guide on how to be demure, modest and respectful in the workplace. 

“A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson and go to the gym looking like Patty and Selma… not demure,” Lebron shared in the video, racking up 53 million views. 

Lebron, a trans woman from Chicago, was reportedly able to pay off the rest of her transition surgery because of the fame and event bookings that followed her TikTok success. 

Then we have reporting from partners like Documented, a digital-first news outlet covering immigration in New York, which provides a very different — and dark — example of how TikTok can deceive users. In this offshore migration story from the outlet, readers learn about Xiong’s dangerous journey from his native China to the U.S., spurred by misinformation he accessed on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok created by parent company ByteDance. 

Documented reports that the 32-year-old factory worker, who reached the U.S. last year, made the treacherous journey through the Darién Gap — a perilous passage between Colombia and Panama with terrain ranging from wet marshlands to mountainous jungle. Much like the Chinese family who had indirectly influenced him to pursue the “American Dream” on Douyin, Xiong was unaware that his journey would take a far different turn.

As one of many asylum seekers trekking through Central America, Xiong faced deportation and extortion on his way to the U.S., and eventually surrendered to border patrol agents at the U.S.-Mexico border after making stops in Kazakhstan, Turkey, Panama, and Ecuador. He told Documented that he was held in detention before being released. 

“I feel quite bitter when I look back,” Xiong said about his migration experience.

Taking these two distinct examples of how TikTok can catapult users to either stardom or misfortune, it’s safe to say that while these cases err on the extreme, many of the platform’s 1.6 billion monthly users — including one-third of U.S. adults who use the site — likely join to get information and stay connected.  

Even as the platform has seen growth among U.S. users in recent years, it’s also come under scrutiny for data and national security concerns. Reporting about this latest national lawsuit, which stems from an investigation on TikTok two years ago, and includes Google’s YouTube, reveals a key argument for why we should be cautious about TikTok and other social media sites.

“They’ve chosen profit over the health and safety, well-being and future of our children,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a news conference in San Francisco cited by the Associated Press. “And that is not something we can accept. So we’ve sued.” 

It’s potentially harming youth and doing so at a time when suicide rates are rising among BIPOC teens. As Alejandra Molina reported for URL Media, rates are even higher for Korean and Vietnamese youth and have doubled for Asian youth over the last two decades (1999-2021). In the original source of her reporting, social media was named as a possible contributor to the spike in suicide.

At the heart of the latest lawsuit is TikTok’s “dopamine-inducing” algorithm, which is often based on a user’s interests, along with features designed to enable endless scrolling, push notifications, and filters that promote unattainable physical traits. 

Luz Media has given attention to this issue, as women and girls are particularly vulnerable on the app. Social media can breed comparison and competition among women, leading to low self-esteem and body dysmorphia. Luz Media cites this study to back the notion that spending more time online can create more harm than good and offers Latinas ways to turn social media as a source of empowerment. 

What can parents and caregivers do?

While this list of action items from Epicenter NYC was originally pegged to managing a youth’s time during summer recess (borrowed from the Know2Protect campaign), it can be applied year-round. Several action items align with the issues raised in TikTok’s latest lawsuit, such as setting time and area limits for device use, discussing the permanency of online data (as online content can last a lifetime), and encouraging open, two-way conversations with your child.

We want to hear from you. How should state lawsuits push TikTok to take accountability for its purported addictive and harmful platform? What do you think lawmakers should do to ensure the safety of young users on social media?