Massachusetts AG Healey among those investigating TikTok

BOSTON – Today, Attorney General Maura Healey launched a nationwide investigation into whether TikTok is designing, operating, and promoting its social media platform to children, teens, and young adults in a manner that causes or exacerbates physical and mental health harms. Attorneys general nationwide are examining whether the company violated state consumer protection laws and put the public at risk.

AG Healey, along with her colleagues across the country, has long expressed concern about the negative impacts of social media platforms on Massachusetts’s youngest residents.

“As children and teens already grapple with issues of anxiety, social pressure, and depression, we cannot allow social media to further harm their physical health and mental wellbeing,” said AG Healey. “State attorneys general have an imperative to protect young people and seek more information about how companies like TikTok are influencing their daily lives.”

The investigation will look into the harms such usage may cause to young people and what TikTok knew about those harms. The investigation focuses, among other things, on the methods and techniques utilized by TikTok to boost young user engagement, including increasing the duration of time spent on the platform and frequency of engagement with the platform.

Several TikTok challenges have resulted in serious injuries and even death.

Leading the investigation into TikTok is a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Vermont. They are joined by a broad group of attorneys general from across the country.