TikTok to pay Alabama $100m and limit teenage use in first state settlement
(www.theguardian.com)
PrivacyTikTok has agreed to pay Alabama at least $100m and enact time limits and other restrictions for teenage users, avoiding a trial with a settlement that was modelled on Instagram-owner Meta’s recent agreement with US states.
Alabama described it as a “first-in-the-nation settlement” with a state in the sweeping litigation over social media’s affect on teen wellbeing.
A trial had been set to begin on Monday in the southern US state over claims by Alabama that TikTok misled parents about tools meant to shield children from harmful content.
TikTok’s settlement with Alabama mirrors safety provisions agreed by Meta, including a two-hour daily time limit for teens, restricted access from midnight to 6am, and suspending notifications during school hours.
It will also strengthen age verification, ban beauty filters for teenagers, and offer young users a non-personalised content feed.
Attorney general Steve Marshall hailed Friday’s settlement as “a great day for Alabama parents”. He said: “Tonight, they can rest easier knowing real protections are in place to shield their children from the dangers of social media addiction.”
Under the settlement, TikTok will send $100m to Alabama and could possibly pay up to $300m in total if 40 other attorneys general sign similar agreements with the company within a specified timeframe.
Alabama’s suit was the latest in a wave of litigation targeting social media companies across the United States about alleged harm their apps cause young users.
In August, Meta agreed to pay $18bn to settle a sweeping lawsuit brought by US states accusing it of designing Instagram and Facebook to get children addicted.
In addition, the Alabama deal includes a conditional restriction that Meta also agreed to: expanding the night-time shutdown period to 10pm to 7am if other platforms also commit to do the same.
“TikTok’s priority has always been fostering a safe and positive space where people can be creative, discover what they love, and connect with their community,” a company spokesperson told AFP.
“This builds on our commitment and core objective to continually enhance our robust safety tools to protect teens,” the spokesperson added.
More than a dozen other states, including California and New York, still havesuits against TikTok.
The company has previously settled cases against it that were headed for trial, including a Los Angeles lawsuit brought by a young woman and a suit from a Kentucky school district.
Meta, by contrast, has taken its chances in court – with bruising results.
In March, a jury in New Mexico ordered the Facebook and Instagram owner to pay $375m after finding it had misled the public about the safety of its platforms for children.
That same month, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google’s YouTube negligent in the case of a 20-year-old woman who said she became hooked on social media as a child, awarding her $6m.
Going to trial would have exposed TikTok to unprecedented public scrutiny of how it handles safety, with company documents and executive testimony potentially aired in open court.
Alabama originally sued TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance in April 2025, alleging the app was engineered to hook young users “just like a sophisticated gambling machine”.
The state later narrowed its case to claims under Alabama’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act, focusing on whether TikTok misrepresented the effectiveness of features such as “Restricted Mode” and “Kids Mode.”
The lawsuit accused TikTok of falsely claiming it limits access to sexual and violent content for young users to have its app rated safe for teens in app stores run by Google, Apple and Microsoft and of misleading users about the Chinese government’s access to US users’ data.
TikTok said it designed its platform with teen safety as a key priority and argued that section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act shields online platforms from liability for user-generated content.
With Agence France-Presse and Reuters
Yet again, surveil and data-mine the victims, give all that power to the perpetrators. Maybe we acknowledge that section 230 doesn't protect the algorithms that feed the addiction machine, rather than throwing our hands up and pretending that there's nothing we can do since all the content is user created?
How to shut down the First Amendment without shutting it down.
Larry Ellison & fam are showing sexual and violent content to kids on their addictive app- But that's free speech, yo!
I mean it literally is. Free speech is the right to distribute information of any kind to anyone.
The government has the authority to protect children from harmful content. It's not protected by trying to assert the right to free speech.
That's on the parents' job. All you're enabling is shutting down of First Amendment, increased unnecessary surveillance, etc. And if there is pornography, then it should be reported and removed anyway.
Just curious if you'd be okay with someone standing outside of school waiting for students to leave, handing out sexual and violent pictures to eight year olds?
If you had to make a fictional scenario to try to get your point, then it's not an actual argument. Violent contents are very much common-place. Video games has a lot of violent contents, and to this date, there has been zero evidence that video games causes real issues at mass scale. As for sexual content, that's unavoidable given so much emphasis on sex by society, that you'd literally have to address marketing to solve it and to change culture at a mass scale as well. It's on the parents at the end of the day. Besides, again, you don't have evidence chat control is effective.
So if what tiktok is doing is legal then why did they settle and change their policy instead of going to trial?
My question about physical content distributed outside a school is just a question about whether showing this content to children is morally acceptable.
I actually didn't realize this case was mostly about kids 13 and older. So some of my arguments may seem a little extreme. But if tiktok tells parents that they offer a restricted version of the app, for little kids, that doesn't include violent and sexual content, and then they come back and say that it's not working as intended and little kids are still seeing this content then that's a problem.
For video games it would be like if a video game had a rating saying it was good for children of all ages and then actually it had sexual scenes and violence.
In most countries that recognize a right to freedom of speech/expression/opinion, it applies to children too - at least for the most part. Certainly so in the US, which this thread is about. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is an international convention that makes this explicit.
Yes children have the right to free speech. But that's not relevant here because Tik Tok isn't run by children. Additionally, even if it was, they still would not be able to show violent and sexual material to other children because it is harmful
Free speech includes the right to receive others' speech.
This article is about American Tiktok and the court case is in Alabama. Ginsberg v. New York gives the government authority to restrict speech that is harmful or obscene to minors, even if that same material might be protected under the first amendment for adults
Also, freedom of speech doesn't protect you from freedom of repercussions. Even if you are allowed to distribute something you may still be liable for any harm or damages it causes.
