Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday filed a civil lawsuit against TikTok on Tuesday, accusing the platform of misrepresenting itself as safe for 13-year-olds while routinely exposing kids to profanity, drug use, and sexual content. The suit was filed in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas and argues the app's design — not just its content — is built to keep young users hooked.
According to CBS News Philadelphia, Sunday said TikTok's 13+ age rating allows children to reach content beyond their years. The complaint, filed under Pennsylvania's Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law, claims TikTok markets itself to app stores as suitable for young teens even as it exposes them to adult material, according to the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General.
Push Notifications and Endless Scroll Named as Deliberate Design
The state's complaint goes further than content moderation complaints, zeroing in on TikTok's interface itself. Push notifications and endless scrolling are identified as deliberate features engineered to induce compulsive usage and maximize ad revenue, even though the company has known protective alternatives available, per the attorney general's office. Advertising revenue rises in proportion to how long users keep scrolling, according to the same filing.
The lawsuit builds directly on findings from Sunday's May 2026 “teenTALK” report, which gathered input from 160 students across 35 Pennsylvania schools. Those closed-door roundtables spanned urban, suburban, and rural districts statewide, and students described feeling “trapped” and “stuck” by addictive social media algorithms, the attorney general's office found.
A New State Unit Built to Take On Big Tech
The teenTALK report wasn't a one-off exercise. It launched alongside a new Technology and Privacy Protection Unit that Sunday established within the Public Protection Division of the state attorney general's office in May 2026, created specifically to investigate and litigate cases involving tech platforms, AI tools, and youth online safety.
Sunday has also pushed for action at the federal level. In February 2026, he joined 39 other state attorneys general in signing a letter urging Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, which would establish a statutory duty of care for online platforms targeting minors while preserving states' own enforcement powers.
Part of a Wider Legal Reckoning for Social Platforms
Pennsylvania's suit lands amid a broader wave of litigation against major platforms over youth mental health. A bipartisan coalition of 14 state attorneys general, co-led by California and New York, sued TikTok in October 2024, alleging the app used dopamine-inducing algorithms, autoplay features, and beauty filters to exploit young users for profit, according to the California Department of Justice. That case followed an August 2024 federal lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission accusing TikTok and parent company ByteDance of violating children's online privacy law by collecting data from users under 13 without parental consent, even within the app's Kids Mode.
Just a day before Pennsylvania filed its complaint, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act functions as a liability defense rather than blanket immunity from suit, clearing the way for more than 3,000 youth addiction lawsuits against TikTok, Meta, Google, and Snap to move toward trial, as reported by TIME. Section 230 has long served as tech companies' primary shield against lawsuits tied to user-generated content.
The financial stakes in these cases are already visible. On August 7, a New Mexico state judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million to fund youth mental health treatment and prevention, pushing total penalties against the company to $942 million in a landmark child safety case, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. That judgment included $375 million in prior civil penalties determined by a jury.
Just How Many Teens Are on the App
The scale of youth engagement helps explain why regulators keep circling back to TikTok. Pew Research Center survey data show roughly 20% of U.S. teenagers report using the platform “almost constantly,” with 57% visiting at least once a day among its nearly 100 million daily U.S. users. Teen girls and minority youth report even higher rates of near-constant use, according to Pew's findings cited in the attorney general's complaint.
Pennsylvania's lawsuit does not specify what monetary damages or corrective actions it is seeking beyond declaratory and injunctive relief. Whether the state will pursue joint trial coordination with the other pending state and federal cases, and how TikTok plans to respond to the allegations about its app store safety disclosures, remain open questions as the litigation moves forward.
