California attorney general announces investigation into TikTok’s impact on children

A nationwide investigation will discover the dangers that the wildly well-liked short-form video app TikTok poses to kids, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta introduced Wednesday.

Among the many points the investigation will deal with can be how the corporate has sought to extend the period and frequency of use of its app by younger individuals, the extent to which the corporate is conscious of any hurt it might be inflicting these customers and whether or not it’s violating shopper safety legal guidelines.

“Our kids are rising up within the age of social media — and plenty of really feel like they should measure as much as the filtered variations of actuality that they see on their screens,” Bonta mentioned in a assertion. “We all know this takes a devastating toll on kids’s psychological well being and well-being. However we don’t know what social media corporations knew about these harms and when.”

“Our nationwide investigation will permit us to get much-needed solutions and decide if TikTok is violating the regulation in selling its platform to younger Californians,” he mentioned.

Bonta’s workplace mentioned that the investigation is being led by attorneys normal from eight states: California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee and Vermont. Unspecified attorneys normal from different states will even be concerned.

TikTok provides a mixture of video leisure and social media that has made it a success amongst many Individuals, particularly younger ones, in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, it turned essentially the most downloaded app on the earth by some metrics.

Responding to the investigation, a TikTok spokesperson advised The Occasions that the corporate cares deeply “about constructing an expertise that helps to guard and help the well-being of our group,” including that the corporate limits sure platform options by age and invests in methods for customers to “take pleasure in content material primarily based on age-appropriateness or household consolation.”

TikTok appreciates “that the state attorneys normal are specializing in the security of youthful customers,” the spokesperson wrote through e mail. “We stay up for offering data on the numerous security and privateness protections we’ve for teenagers.”

Not way back, the app’s future in the US regarded unsure. In August 2020, then-President Trump issued an government order aimed toward banning the app — which is owned by the Chinese language firm ByteDance — within the U.S., citing nationwide safety issues. ByteDance held talks with Microsoft and different U.S. corporations with the aim of avoiding a shutdown by handing over possession or management of consumer information.

Though some safety questions nonetheless linger, threats of an outright ban have since evaporated.

In November, Bonta helped launch the same investigation into how Instagram, one other social community, tries to spice up engagement amongst younger customers, and the psychological well being impact on these customers. (Bonta hasn’t issued a information launch updating the general public on the standing of that investigation since he first introduced it.)

The opening of that investigation got here after Meta — the corporate that owns Instagram — paused plans to develop a kid-focused spinoff app after data revealed by whistleblower Frances Haugen indicated that Instagram can hurt the psychological well being of younger customers, particularly teenage women.

Reporting by the Wall Avenue Journal revealed that Meta was conscious of however constantly downplayed these issues.

Bonta’s new investigation into TikTok can be a bipartisan endeavor, with the Republican attorneys normal of Florida, Kentucky, Nebraska and Tennessee main it in partnership with their Democratic counterparts from California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Vermont. Tech regulation is among the few areas in up to date politics round which bipartisan consensus remains to be commonplace, though the 2 events differ of their emphasis, with liberals specializing in misinformation and monopoly energy and conservatives elevating alarms about censorship and bias.

Issues revolving across the security of kids have proved significantly unifying. Heated debates concerning the extent to which social media platforms ought to regulate their customers’ content material virtually uniformly draw the road at youngster sexual abuse materials. Age limits, although not constantly enforced, are additionally commonplace on-line.

Even President Biden’s State of the Union deal with, delivered the night time earlier than Bonta’s announcement, touched on the problem.

“As Frances Haugen, who’s right here tonight with us, has proven, we should maintain social media platforms accountable for the nationwide experiment they’re conducting on our youngsters for revenue,” Biden mentioned. “It’s time to strengthen privateness protections, ban focused promoting to kids [and] demand tech corporations cease gathering private information on our youngsters.”