New Delhi: An Alabama courtroom has now becomes the unlikely battleground this week for a fight that’s been building for years: did TikTok knowingly hook a generation of kids on a platform it knew was harmful?
Jury selection starts Monday in Montgomery, where the state is arguing for TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, which built an addictive product and then downplayed the risks to consumers. It’s the first case out of a sprawling wave of litigation against the company to actually reach a jury expected to run two to three weeks and that alone makes it worth watching. Every other case selected for trial so far, TikTok has settled before it got this far.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, filed the suit last year. He’s not alone at least 27 other states and Washington, D.C. Has recently filed similar lawsuits against the platform. What makes this one more highlighted is less the claim itself and more what might come out during trial. TikTok has fought hard to keep its internal operations sealed from public view, so a full trial could crack open documents and testimony the company has managed to keep buried through settlements.
The state’s argument gets specific. It claims TikTok asks users to self-report their age but lets them dodge that entirely by watching videos without ever creating an account while TikTok still quietly collects data on what they’re watching. That loophole, the lawsuit says, makes “Kids Mode” essentially decorative. There’s also the filter bubble argument that the platform’s recommendation engine pulls young users toward increasingly intense content, including violent or otherwise harmful material, the longer they stay engaged.
TikTok, for its part, isn’t backing down on the legal theory. The company maintains it designed the platform with teen safety as a priority, and leans on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act the law shielding platforms from liability over what users post as its central defense.
Worth noting: this isn’t happening in a vacuum. Meta just settled a similar fight last month for $17.1 billion with 47 states plus D.C. and U.S. territories, agreeing to change how teens access Instagram and Facebook. Part of that deal even ties $5 billion of the payout to whether TikTok, Snap, and YouTube adopt the same terms. TikTok hasn’t said a word publicly about it.
