Utah became the latest state Tuesday to file a lawsuit against TikTok, alleging the company is “baiting” children into addictive and unhealthy social media habits.
TikTok lures children into hours of social media use, misrepresents the app’s safety and deceptively portrays itself as independent of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, Utah claims in the lawsuit.
“We will not stand by while these companies fail to take adequate, meaningful action to protect our children. We will prevail in holding social media companies accountable by any means necessary,” Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit, which was filed in state court in Salt Lake City.
I can’t see this surviving a first amendment challenge, but we’ll see.
I think it could be regulated to a positive effect. We regulate all sorts of things that are addictive, see gambling and substances. We also regulate speech on broadcast TV and radio. And, children should be given elevated protections to data harvesting which is what these companies are really doing. Do i expect the government to fuck this up? Absolutely, but don’t let people hide behind first amendment bullshit to avoid the conversation.
Note that I think it’s awful. This won’t fix it.