Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ (R) office revealed on Tuesday that it filed three lawsuits against TikTok and Meta for exposing children to “a world of inappropriate, damaging content,” Fox News Digital reported.
The lawsuits, filed by Attorney General Tim Griffin, claim that the social media giants violated the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which prohibits companies from engaging in fraudulent or deceptive business practices.
Sanders told Fox News Digital, “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.”
“Arkansas is leading the charge on filing three lawsuits against TikTok and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram,” she continued. “These actions are a long time coming. We have watched over the past decade as one social media company after another has exploited our kids for profit and escaped government oversight. My administration will not tolerate that failed status quo.”
According to Sanders’ office, one of the lawsuits has already been filed against Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. The complaint alleges that the social media parent company puts its “growth at all costs” and has been “targeting young users of its products to the detriment of their mental and physical health.”
The governor’s office added that Meta has been “rewiring how our children think, feel and behave” and has participated in deceptive business practices by misleading “consumers about the addictive nature of its products.”
Sanders and her office claimed that Arkansas’ children had been the victims of Meta’s action and that the company should be held responsible.
A lawsuit filed by Sanders’ office accused the parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, of containing an “abundance of posts dealing with mature themes, nudity and drugs viewed by minors despite TikTok’s claims that such posts are unavailable to maintain teenager-approved ratings on various application stores.”
The final lawsuit, also against ByteDance, pertains to the “deception by TikTok that the user data of Arkansans is safe from access by the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.”
“China is a foreign adversary that is targeting our children through social media in a serious challenge to American values,” the governor’s office stated. “China is also threatening our nation’s security and our citizens’ privacy by leveraging information technologies like TikTok against the United States.”
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