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.

  • Lightor
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    01 year ago

    And who decides that. And who decides what is classified as “social media”? Once you give the govt this power they will be able to use to pretty liberally.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      All websites where you can post comments and all multiplayer video games are social media to some degree. And would become so to an even more degree if you ever somehow magically banned kids from more mainstream sites (which is a comical pipe dream that might actually make the sites more appealing).

      So basically, they’re proposing the internet be blocked for minors. No, they don’t actually mean that. You see, they want the sites they dislike to be blocked. Like Facebook. But not the things they use like Lemmy. You see, they’re better than you, so the things they like are okay. It’s just the things you like that are dumb and harmful.

      • @meliaesc
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        01 year ago

        Your assumptions are very odd. I’m also fine with disabling comments and interaction on the entire internet for certain ages. Is it feasible? No, but I don’t think it’s infringing on rights or censoring information to require a somewhat developed brain to engage with the scientifically proven harmful aspects of “social media”.