Texas Judge Rules TikTok Violated Consumer Protection Law Over Child Safety Claims

A Texas judge has ruled that TikTok violated the state's consumer protection law by providing misleading information to users about child safety on the platform. The case stemmed from a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against TikTok.

Paxton's office had alleged multiple deceptive promotional practices by TikTok. The state accused TikTok of describing content involving drugs, nudity, alcohol and profanity as rare and mild in order to maintain its age rating in app stores and encourage parents to allow their children to use the platform. But Texas authorities concluded after investigation that minors could in fact easily access large amounts of such content. The court ruling focused on TikTok's so-called restricted mode. The court found that TikTok misled consumers in promoting this feature. According to the ruling, TikTok's messaging created the impression that restricted mode could effectively protect children from inappropriate content, but the actual situation did not reach the level implied by its promotion.

In this case, the Texas government also pointed to discrepancies between TikTok's publicly released community guidelines and the content actually permitted on the platform. For example, TikTok's public rules explicitly state that drug promotion is not allowed, but Texas authorities argued that the platform in practice had exception policies for content such as marijuana. In addition, Texas alleged that TikTok made descriptions to consumers that did not match reality regarding heavy profanity, sexualized content and other adult content. The case involved the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act (DTPA). The law allows the state government to take action against deceptive business practices by companies and to ask a court to make findings of violations and impose corresponding civil penalties. The Texas Attorney General's Office had previously asked the court to find that TikTok's relevant conduct violated the consumer protection law and to prohibit TikTok from continuing such practices.

The court has found that some of its statements regarding child safety features and content filtering capabilities were misleading.