Louisiana Attorney General Requesting Apple and Google Revise TikTok App Store Age Rating to Protect Minors

Baton Rouge, Louisiana – In an effort to protect the safety of Louisiana's children, Attorney General Jeff Landry is requesting that Apple and Google revise their application store age ratings for TikTok, enabling parents to prevent their children from being forcibly exposed to hazardous content online.

“Our children are our State’s greatest resources, and I will continue doing everything I can to keep them safe,” said Attorney General Landry. “While our investigation into TikTok continues, the evidence uncovered so far shows that the platform is not safe for minors.”

In a pair of letters to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Attorney General Landry and fourteen of his colleagues detailed the misleading nature of the social media application's existing ratings. Without rating changes, the states reserve the right to take legal action against the firms for misrepresenting TikTok, including litigation and civil penalties, according to the attorneys general.

“TikTok may be the most dangerous social media platform for children and engages in a race to the bottom to ensure teens become addicted and loyal to the brand,” explained Attorney General Landry. “TikTok abuses our internet freedoms to stunt our children socially through 24/7 viral content filled with sex, drugs, alcohol, and illegal conduct.”

The attorney general indicated that the existing ratings of "T" for "Teen" in the Google Play App store and "12+" in Apple's App Store promote huge consumer deception and misrepresent the problematic content found on TikTok and given to youngsters. While TikTok does provide a "restricted mode," the company is aware that many of its users are under 13 and have lied about their age to create profiles on the network.

The TikTok app contains frequent and intense alcohol, tobacco, and drug use or references, as well as sexual content, vulgar language, and mature/suggestive themes. TikTok users can search for hundreds of thousands of hashtags related to these topics, each of which returns thousands of videos in these categories: instructional videos about drug use, descriptions of drinking games, recipes for cannabis edibles, demonstrations of vaping tricks, pole dancing routines, and millions of videos set to songs with explicit lyrics, which TikTok makes available in its music library.

TikTok not only enables users to find this content, but it also proposes it to users through its "autocomplete" search function and by providing this type of content to users on the "For You" tab – even for accounts registered to users under 13 years old.

“Parents depend on the accuracy of age ratings,” wrote the attorneys general. “When parents are deceived into letting their kids download TikTok, there are real consequences. Exposure to drug, alcohol, and tobacco content on social media makes kids more likely to use or experiment with those illicit substances in real life. And exposure to sexual content on TikTok can lead to pornography addiction and even the sexual exploitation of kids by online predators.”