BATON ROUGE, LA – Fighting
to keep Louisiana children safe, Attorney General Jeff Landry is calling on
Apple and Google to correct their application store age ratings of TikTok –
helping parents protect their kids from being force-fed
harmful content online.
“Our children are our State’s
greatest resources, and I will continue doing everything I can to keep them
safe,” said Attorney General Landry. “While our investigation into TikTok
continues, the evidence uncovered so far shows that the platform is not safe
for minors.”
In a pair of letters to Apple
CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Attorney General Landry and 14
of his colleagues outlined the deceptive nature of the current ratings for the
social media application. The attorneys general said
that – without rating corrections – the states
reserve the right to take legal action against the companies for the
misrepresenting TikTok, up to and including litigation and civil
penalties.
“TikTok may be the most
dangerous social media platform for children and engages in a race to the
bottom to ensure teens become addicted and loyal to the brand,” explained
Attorney General Landry. “TikTok abuses our internet freedoms to stunt our children
socially through 24/7 viral content filled with sex, drugs, alcohol,
and illegal conduct.”
The current ratings of “T” for
“Teen” in the Google Play App store and “12+” in Apple’s App Store facilitates
the deception of consumers on a massive scale and falsely represents the
objectionable content found and served to children on TikTok. While TikTok does
have a “restricted mode” available, it is also aware that many its users are under
13 and have lied about their age in order to create a profile on its
platform.
The TikTok app contains
frequent and intense alcohol, tobacco, and drug use or references, sexual
content, profanity, and mature/suggestive themes. TikTok users can search for
hundreds of thousands of hashtags related to these topics, which each return
thousands of videos in these categories—instructional videos about drug use,
descriptions of drinking games, recipes for cannabis edibles, demonstrations of
vaping tricks, pole dancing routines, and millions of videos set to songs with
explicit lyrics, which TikTok makes available to users in its music
library.
TikTok not only allows users to
find this content, but it suggests it to users through its “autocomplete”
search function and by offering this type of content to users on the “For You”
page – including for accounts registered to 13-year-old users.
“Parents depend on the accuracy
of age ratings,” wrote the attorneys general. “When parents are deceived
into letting their kids download TikTok, there are real consequences. Exposure
to drug, alcohol, and tobacco content on social media makes kids more likely to
use or experiment with those illicit substances in real life. And exposure to
sexual content on TikTok can lead to pornography addiction and even the sexual
exploitation of kids by online predators.”
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Attorney General Jeff Landry was joined in the letters by the attorneys general
from Montana, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky,
Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.