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tiktok
State AGs Launch Lawsuit Against TikTok for Harming Children
"We are suing TikTok to protect young people and help combat the nationwide youth mental health crisis," explained New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Oct 08, 2024
Attorneys general from over a dozen states and the District of Columbia on Tuesday announced lawsuits against TikTok, accusing the company behind the popular social media platform of deliberately making the site addictive for children and deceiving the public about its dangers.
"We're suing the social media giant TikTok for exploiting young users and deceiving the public about the dangers the platform poses to our youth," Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta
explained Tuesday morning in San Francisco. "Together, with my fellow state AGs, we will hold TikTok to account, stop its exploitation of our young people, and end its deceit."
New York Attorney General Letitia James, also a Democrat, said in a
statement that "young people are struggling with their mental health because of addictive social media platforms like TikTok."
"TikTok claims that their platform is safe for young people, but that is far from true," she continued. "In New York and across the country, young people have died or gotten injured doing dangerous TikTok challenges and many more are feeling more sad, anxious, and depressed because of TikTok's addictive features."
"Today, we are suing TikTok to protect young people and help combat the nationwide youth mental health crisis," James added. "Kids and families across the country are desperate for help to address this crisis, and we are doing everything in our power to protect them."
James' office said in a
statement:
TikTok uses a variety of addictive features to keep users on its platform longer, which leads to poorer mental health outcomes. Multiple studies have found a link between excessive social media use, poor sleep quality, and poor mental health among young people. According to the U.S. surgeon general, young people who spend more than three hours per day on social media face double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes, including symptoms of depression and anxiety.
According to James' office, TikTok's addictive features include:
- Around-the-clock notifications that can lead to poor sleep patterns for young users;
- Autoplay of an endless stream of videos that manipulates users into compulsively spending more time on the platform with no option to disable;
- Attention-grabbing content that keeps young users on the platform longer;
- TikTok "stories" and TikTok live content that is only available temporarily to entice users to tune in immediately or lose the opportunity to interact;
- A highlighted "likes" and comments section as a form of social validation, which can impact young users' self-esteem; and
- Beauty filters that alter one's appearance and can lower young users' self-esteem.
The attorneys general also accuse TikTok of violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which is meant to shield children's online data; of falsely claiming that its platform is safe for children; and of lying about the effectiveness of its so-called safety tools meant to mitigate harms to youth.
In addition to California and New York, the following states are part of the new lawsuit: Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Jersey, Oregon, South Carolina, Vermont, and Washington. So is the District of Columbia.
All told, 23 states have now filed lawsuits targeting TikTok's harms to children.
However, the issue is by no means limited to TikTok. Last October, dozens of U.S. states
sued Meta—which owns the social media sites Facebook and Instagram—for allegedly violating consumer protection laws by designing their apps to be addictive, especially to minors.
Twitter, the social platform known as X since shortly after it was
purchased by Elon Musk in 2022 for $44 billion, was sued in 2021 by child sex trafficking victims for allowing the publication of sexually explicit images of minors and refusing to remove them as requested by the plaintiffs and their parents.
Last month, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission
published a report detailing how social media and streaming companies endanger children and teens who use their platforms. The report's publication sparked renewed calls for Congress to pass legislation including the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act and Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to better safeguard minors against the companies' predatory practices.
However, rights groups including the ACLU condemned KOSA, which the civil liberties organization
warned "would violate the First Amendment by enabling the federal government to dictate what information people can access online and encourage social media platforms to censor protected speech."
The two bills—which were
overwhelmingly passed by the U.S. Senate in July—were last month approved for advancement in the House of Representatives.
In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on "the growing concerns about the effects of social media on youth mental health."
The White House simultaneously announced the creation of a federal task force "to advance the health, safety, and privacy of minors online with particular attention to preventing and mitigating the adverse health effects of online platforms."
Murthy has also called for tobacco-like warning labels on social media to address the platform's possible harms to children and teens.
Some critics are wary of singling out TikTok—which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance—for political or xenophobic purposes.
Earlier this year, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law a $95 billion foreign aid package containing a possible nationwide TikTok ban. The legislation requires ByteDance to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese company within a year or face a federal ban. TikTok subsequently sued the federal government over the potential ban.
Approximately 170 million Americans use TikTok, which is especially popular among members of Gen-Z and small-to-medium-sized businesses, and contributes tens of billions of dollars to the U.S. economy annually.
Evan Greer, who heads the digital rights group Fight for the Future, slammed the law as "one of the stupidest and most authoritarian pieces of tech legislation we've seen in years."
However, children's advocates welcomed the new lawsuits.
"We are pleased to see so many state attorneys general holding TikTok accountable for deliberately causing harms to young people," said Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay. "Between state and private lawsuits, state legislation, and Federal Trade Commission enforcement actions, the tide is turning against Big Tech, and it's clear the status quo of social media companies harming kids cannot and will not continue."
"Now we need leaders in the House to join their Senate counterparts in passing the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act so that all platforms, not just those involved in legal settlements, will have to be safe by design for children from day one," Golin added.
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FTC Report Shows Profit-Hungry Tech Giants 'Harmful to Children and Teens'
"Online platforms use sophisticated and opaque techniques of data collection that endanger young people and put their healthy development at risk," said one children's advocate.
Sep 19, 2024
Child welfare advocates renewed calls for U.S. lawmakers to pass a pair of controversial bills aimed at protecting youth from Big Tech's "dangerous and unacceptable business practices" after the Federal Trade Commission published a report Thursday detailing how social media and streaming companies endanger children and teens who use their platforms.
The FTC staff report—entitled A Look Behind the Screens: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services—"shows how the tech industry's monetization of personal data has created a market for commercial surveillance, especially via social media and video streaming services, with inadequate guardrails to protect consumers."
The agency staff examined the practices of Meta platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp; YouTube; X, formerly known as Twitter; Snapchat; Reddit; Discord; Amazon, which owns the gaming site Twitch; and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok.
"The report finds that these companies engaged in mass data collection of their users and—in some cases—nonusers," Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine said in the paper. "It reveals that many companies failed to implement adequate safeguards against privacy risks. It sheds light on how companies used our personal data, from serving hypergranular targeted advertisements to powering algorithms that shape the content we see, often with the goal of keeping us hooked on using the service."
The publication "also finds that these practices pose unique risks to children and teens, with the companies having done little to respond effectively to the documented concerns that policymakers, psychologists, and parents have expressed over young people's physical and mental well-being."
FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement that "the report lays out how social media and video streaming companies harvest an enormous amount of Americans' personal data and monetize it to the tune of billions of dollars a year."
"While lucrative for the companies, these surveillance practices can endanger people's privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms, from identify theft to stalking," she added.
Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard University published an analysis last December that revealed social media companies made nearly $11 billion in 2022 advertising revenue from U.S.-based users younger than 18.
According to the FTC report:
While the use of social media and digital technology can provide many positive opportunities for self-directed learning, forming community, and reducing isolation, it also has been associated with harms to physical and mental health, including through exposure to bullying, online harassment, child sexual exploitation, and exposure to content that may exacerbate mental health issues, such as the promotion of eating disorders, among other things.
The publication also flags "algorithms that may prioritize certain forms of harmful content, such as dangerous online challenges."
The report accuses social media companies of "willful blindness around child users" by claiming that there are no children on their platforms because their sites do not allow them to create accounts. This may constitute an attempt by the companies to avoid legal liability under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA). Last December, Khan
proposed sweeping changes to COPPA to address the issue.
Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay—a nonprofit organization "committed to helping children thrive in an increasingly commercialized, screen-obsessed culture"—said in a statement that "this report from the FTC is yet more proof that Big Tech's business model is harmful to children and teens."
"Online platforms use sophisticated and opaque techniques of data collection that endanger young people and put their healthy development at risk," Golin added. "We thank the FTC for listening to the concerns raised by Fairplay and a coalition of advocacy groups, and we call on Congress to pass COPPA 2.0, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, and KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, to better safeguard our children from these companies' dangerous and unacceptable business practices."
On Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to advance COPPA 2.0 and KOSA, both of which were overwhelmingly passed by the Senate in July.
However, rights groups including the ACLU condemned KOSA, which the civil liberties organization warned "would violate the First Amendment by enabling the federal government to dictate what information people can access online and encourage social media platforms to censor protected speech."
In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on "the growing concerns about the effects of social media on youth mental health."
The White House simultaneously announced the creation of a federal task force "to advance the health, safety, and privacy of minors online with particular attention to preventing and mitigating the adverse health effects of online platforms."
Murthy has also called for tobacco-like warning labels on social media to address the platform's possible harms to children and teens.
According to a study published in January by the corporate power watchdog Ekō, in just one week that month there were more than 33 million posts on TikTok and Meta-owned Instagram "under hashtags housing problematic content directed at young users," including suicide, eating disorders, skin-whitening, and so-called "involuntary celibacy."
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US Medalist's Experience of Free Healthcare in Olympic Village Bolsters Case for Medicare for All
"In the Olympic Village in Paris, everyone has free healthcare as a human right. In America, 1 in 4 cancer patients go bankrupt or lose their homes because of the outrageously high cost of care."
Aug 09, 2024
U.S. Olympic rugby player Ariana Ramsey became a sensation on social media this week after documenting a series of free healthcare visits in the Olympic Village in Paris and becoming an advocate for universal care in her home country.
Ramsey's initial TikTok video, published Saturday, went viral in France after she expressed disbelief about the free healthcare on offer, playing into the European idea that Americans—who live in the only high-income country in the world without universal care—don't know what they are missing.
"I literally just got a pap smear—for free," Ramsey, who won a bronze medal last week, said. "And I have a dentist appointment, and an eye exam next week. Like, what!?"
@ariana.ramsey I quite literally love it here. The way the Olympic village has free healthcare, but America doesn’t😣 #o#olympicso#olympicvillageo#olympiant#teamusar#rugbyb#bronzemedalist ♬ original sound - Ari Ramsey
The Olympic Village polyclinic offers cardiology, orthopedics, physiotherapy, psychology, podiatry and sports medicine—all free of charge to athletes, according toSports Illustrated. The tradition of free healthcare for athletes dates back nearly a century.
Ramsey, a 24-year-old from Pennsylvania who played rugby at Dartmouth College, said in a video that "there's no reason why me, an American girl, should be so amazed by free healthcare."
In a separate post on Monday, recording while sitting in a dentist's chair, Ramsey said, "This is going to be my new fight for action, free healthcare in America. Period."
She now describes herself as a "universal free healthcare advocate" in her TikTok bio.
Medicare for All advocates argued that everyone in the U.S. should have the same access to healthcare that athletes have at the Olympics.
"In the Olympic Village in Paris, everyone has free healthcare as a human right," Warren Gunnels, a top aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and a staff director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, wrote on social media. "In America, 1 in 4 cancer patients go bankrupt or lose their homes because of the outrageously high cost of care and 68,000 die a year because they can't afford healthcare. Yes. We need Medicare for All."
Many Olympians have other jobs to pay the bills. Ramsey, for example, is a certified personal trainer. The U.S. is one of the only countries that doesn't directly fund its Olympic athletes, according toVoice of America.
"U.S. Olympians are using their trip to the Olympics to get the basic preventative healthcare they can't afford to get in the U.S.," Melanie D'Arrigo, the executive director of Campaign for New York Health, wrote on social media. "We should be embarrassed that we're the only industrialized country without universal healthcare—all because lobbyists pay off our politicians."
If Ramsey's newfound role as a political campaigner comes as a surprise, it's not the first for her in Paris: the U.S. women's team had never before medaled in rugby, and the last U.S. men's medal was 100 years ago.
The result came in stunning fashion. Down to Australia in the final seconds of the bronze medal match, Ramsey got the ball and threw it to teammate Alex Sedrick, who made a miraculous run the length of the field to tie the game just as time expired, and then converted a kick to win the game.
THE MOST CLUTCH TRY IN @USARugby HISTORY 😱
Spiff Sedrick wins it for Team USA in the final seconds!#ParisOlympicspic.twitter.com/lml8fLVmsn
— Team USA (@TeamUSA) July 30, 2024
For Ramsey, the bronze medal likely means she'll receive a bonus of $15,000 from the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee. She's also tried to maximize the medical benefits of being an Olympian in Paris, visiting a gynecologist, dentist, and ophthalmologist.
Back home, medical services won't be as accessible, at least not for many Americans. There were more than 25 million non-elderly uninsured people in the U.S. as of 2022, according to KFF, a health policy research nonprofit. Even a routine pap smear can cost $125 to $250 for an uninsured person. U.S. spending on health care exceeds any other high-income country and yet its health outcomes are consistently the worst among peer nations.
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