Attorney General Ellison sues TikTok for preying on young people with addictive algorithms and exploitative features

Alleges TikTok directly profited from addicting children, including through an illegal virtual economy

August 19, 2025 (SAINT PAUL) — Today, Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against TikTok Inc. for violating Minnesota’s consumer protection laws. This lawsuit follows the Attorney General’s federal lawsuit filed against Meta in October 2023 for similar violations through its design of Instagram and Facebook.

Attorney General Ellison will prove in court that TikTok has prioritized profit over wellbeing at virtually every turn. Today’s Complaint, filed in Hennepin County District Court, shows how TikTok ensnares young users in cycles of excessive use through app design features that prey on young people’s neurodevelopmental vulnerabilities. The filing details the company’s strategic decision to squeeze time, attention, data, and even money out of young users by maximizing their time spent on TikTok.  For example, TikTok paired a livestreaming feature—TikTok LIVE—with unlicensed virtual currencies that have resulted in documented instances of sexual and financial exploitation of young TikTok users. 

Concurrent with the rise of TikTok, Minnesota has documented significant increases in rates of depression, anxiety, and hopelessness in Minnesota youth. Numerous studies have found that excessive use of TikTok and other social media platforms can severely harm the mental health of young people, with one study in particular finding that increased use of social media can double the risk of negative mental health outcomes like depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation. A recent survey found that 54% of Minnesota’s 11th graders reported feeling down, depressed, or hopeless at least several days a week, and nearly 70% reported feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge.

“If you know nothing else about TikTok, you know it’s extremely addicting,” said Attorney General Ellison. “My office’s extensive investigation into the company has confirmed that addictiveness is the result of years of intentional decisions that TikTok’s leadership made in the pursuit of profit. We also know that spending excessive time on TikTok can be harmful to someone’s mental health. Young people are particularly vulnerable to the harms TikTok can inflict since the regions of their brains that manage things like impulse control, decision-making, and risk-taking are still developing.

“Simply put, the more people TikTok can get addicted to its app, the more money they make, and the more their users’ mental health suffers,” added Ellison. “This conduct is not just deeply immoral, it’s illegal. Today, I am filing a lawsuit to bring an end to TikTok’s preying on Minnesota’s children.”

The Attorney General’s filing accuses TikTok of engaging in deceptive and unfair business practices that violate Minnesota’s consumer protection laws. This includes:

• Creating a highly addictive algorithm and other predatory features designed to extract time, attention, data, and money from young users without accurately informing them or their parents of the known dangers of their products.
  • These predatory features include: 1) a Recommendation Engine that leverages user data to serve personalized content recommendations; (2) an infinite scroll that keeps users engaged in an endless state of swiping through the app; (3) excessive push notifications that encourage repetitive checking of the app; (4) filters and effects that create idealized and unattainable images of users; and (5) TikTok LIVE, which encourages excessive and exploitative spending and conduct.
• Lying about the safety of its platform to the public and downplaying the risks posed to young users.
• Operating an illegal money transmitter system through TikTok LIVE that allowed the company to profit from the financial and sexual exploitation of children.

With the lawsuit, Attorney General Ellison seeks to hold TikTok liable for its illegal business practices and to protect young Minnesotans from harm to their health. In the complaint, he asks the court to require substantive changes in how the company operates. Attorney General Ellison also seeks penalties and other monetary relief to address the harms that these practices have caused and to deter future illegal conduct. The Attorney General’s investigation will continue throughout the course of this litigation.

How TikTok Addicts Young People

The Neurodevelopmental Vulnerabilities of Young People
For more details, see pages 16 – 18 of the filing

Brain regions associated with desires for risk-taking, attention, peer feedback, and reinforcement––like the dopamine system––become particularly sensitive in adolescence, while regions like the prefrontal cortex—associated with higher-order decision making and impulse control—are not fully developed until adulthood. 

One Example of How TikTok Exploits these Vulnerabilities
For more details, see pages 27 – 31 of the filing

One example of how TikTok takes advantage of the neurodevelopmental vulnerabilities of children and teenagers is its Recommendation Engine. TikTok collects massive amounts of data on every single user’s activity, from likes to comments, to how long they spend watching a video, to the subject of the video, and more. TikTok constantly feeds this data into its Recommendation Engine, an algorithm that ranks content based on how likely an individual user is to engage with it. The Engine then uses those rankings to serve users with content it believes they will find compelling. The end result is a personalized stream of highly curated videos designed to be uniquely captivating to an individual user and keep users scrolling endlessly through the app. This feedback loop between use, data, and the Recommendation Engine is the core of TikTok’s platform and can repeatedly tap into each user’s brain-reward systems, especially the underdeveloped reward systems of young people, in order to keep them actively engaged on the app. In 

TikTok’s Recommendation Engine is a carefully designed machine with a clear end goal: to maximize use by trapping a user’s attention and minimizing their ability to control the time they spend on the app—in other words, to addict users, especially young people whose stage of neurological development makes them particularly susceptible to the Recommendation Engine’s end goal of trapping users’ attention.

Vivek Murthy, the former Surgeon General of the United States, summarized the issue well during a 2023 interview, saying: “We have some of the best designers and product developers in the world who have designed these products to make sure people are maximizing the amount of time they spend on these platforms. And if we tell a child, ‘Use the force of your willpower to control how much time you’re spending [on social media],’ you’re pitting a child against the world’s greatest product designers and that’s just not a fair fight.”

How TikTok Harms Young People

Compulsive Use Harms Youth Mental and Physical Health
For more details, see pages 18 – 25 of the filing

The harms caused by TikTok are many and varied. A mix of scientific studies and expert analysis have found that compulsive social media use is harmful to the mental health and physical well-being of young people. For example, one study found that children who spend significant amounts of time per day on social media face double the risk of poor mental health outcomes, including symptoms of depression and anxiety and elevated risks of suicidal behaviors or ideation. Prolonged use of TikTok has also been found to induce body dissatisfaction, disordered eating behaviors, low self-esteem, self-harm, suicidal thoughts or actions, and other negative mental health outcomes. Heavy TikTok use also disrupts activities like sleep and physical activity, which are critical for youth psychological and physical health. 

TikTok Subjects Young People to Sexual Exploitation
For more details, see pages 57 – 59 and 65 – 71 of the filing

Furthermore, TikTok regularly subjects young people to sexual exploitation by allowing users to host live broadcasts and by allowing viewers of those livestreams to message hosts and even send them a virtual currency that can be exchanged for real money. An investigation by Forbes found that these features amounted to "a strip club filled with 15-year-olds." TikTok’s own internal investigation revealed that tips in exchange for sexual content was the primary revenue generator for TikTok’s live gifting function and that such transactional, sexual content was heavily promoted by TikTok’s own algorithm. Multiple external investigations have found minors engaging in such broadcasts, and TikTok themselves acknowledge such functionality risks the grooming of minors.

TikTok Risks Youth Financial Exploitation
For more details, see pages 38 – 45 of the filing

TikTok also risks subjecting young people to financial exploitation. The constant barrage of highly personalized advertising combined with TikTok’s virtual currency system, which is designed deliberately to confuse users, can lead to overspending. This is especially prevalent among young people, who are particularly vulnerable to online financial exploitation, as they struggle to understand the impact money can have on their lives because most have never had to manage finances.

TikTok Harms the Self-Image of Young People
For more details, see pages 34 – 38 of the filing

Finally, TikTok features “filters” and “effects” that allows users to edit their appearance in content they post by, for example, artificially smoothing skin, whitening teeth, enlarging lips, and modifying facial features to create a skinnier face or smaller nose. These filters cosmetically reshape a user’s face in a hyper-realistic way. They are sophisticated and track faces seamlessly, avoiding glitches that could reveal the use of a filter, thus blurring the line between what is real and what is fake. These filters warp young users’ self-image and sense of self and are unsafe for their mental health. TikTok knows that beauty filters inflict significant harm on young users. TikTok’s Trust and Safety team acknowledged in an internal 2023 recommendations report on “Mental Health” that beauty filters are “causing severe psychological harm” to minors.

An example of TikTok’s “Bold Glamor” filter

TikTok’s Reach and Consumption
For more details, see pages 1 – 5 of the filing

Few companies have captured children’s time and converted it to profit as quickly and effectively as TikTok. Today, 95% of U.S. smartphone users ages 13-17 have downloaded TikTok. The company’s own data shows that 13- to 17-year-olds check the app an average of 17 times a day and spend an average of almost two hours a day on the app, more than any other age group. 24% of users age 13-17 average three or more hours of use a day.

Attorney General Ellison urges Minnesotans to share their stories about the negative effects that TikTok has had on them or their loved ones by visiting www.ag.state.mn.us/social-media and filling out the Office’s Social Media Use and Addiction Report Form, where they can share their experiences of how TikTok is affecting the physical and mental health of young people in Minnesota.