Arkansas sues TikTok, Meta for 'pushing addictive platforms'

Arkansas filed a lawsuit against Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta, and two lawsuits against TikTok and its China-based parent company ByteDance over concerns about how the platforms are affecting children.

"We have to hold Big Tech companies accountable for pushing addictive platforms on our kids and exposing them to a world of inappropriate, damaging content," Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday when announcing the lawsuits.

Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin said all three lawsuits have the common theme of "deception." 

The lawsuit against Meta focuses on how the social media giant uses "algorithms that are addictive to adolescents and are rewiring how our children think, feel and behave" while hiding "the nature of their products in pursuit of profits and growth," Griffin said. 

The attorney general said that the first TikTok and ByteDance lawsuit focuses on how the video app is marketed as being "appropriate for teenage users while offering an abundance of posts that contain mature themes, nudity and drugs, all of which is readily available to minors," Griffin also said.

The other lawsuit against TikTok and ByteDance targets how the platforms claim that user data is not accessible to the Chinese Communist Party, even though ByteDance is forced under Chinese law to cooperate with the government's intelligence activities.

U.S. officials are increasingly voicing concerns about the security risks behind TikTok, and members of Congress are considering banning the app across the U.S.