Home General News In Case You Missed It: Why’s Everyone Talking About TikTok?

In Case You Missed It: Why’s Everyone Talking About TikTok?

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In case you missed it: Why’s everyone talking about TikTok?

  • Staff Report
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TikTok had more than 86 million American users last year, most of them skewing young—80% of them were 16 to 34. So that’s a lot of people likely alarmed by politicians’ recent interest in the popular video-sharing platform.

Attorney General Todd Rokita has launched two lawsuits against TikTok. One alleges that “TikTok has lured children onto the platform through a variety of misleading representations indicating that the app contains only ‘infrequent/mild’ sexual content, profanity, or drug references—when in reality the app is rife with extreme examples of such material,” according to the AG’s press release.

The other lawsuit claims that “TikTok has reams of highly sensitive data and personal information about Indiana consumers and has deceived those consumers to believe that this information is protected from the Chinese government and Communist Party.”

A Chinese company called ByteDance owns TikTok.

“The TikTok app is a malicious and menacing threat unleashed on unsuspecting Indiana consumers by a Chinese company that knows full well the harms it inflicts on users,” Rokita said in the release. “With this pair of lawsuits, we hope to force TikTok to stop its false, deceptive and misleading practices, which violate Indiana law.”

Since bringing the suits, Rokita has also asked Apple and Google to change their ratings of the app, raising the suggested minimum age and labeling it “mature” rather than “teen.”

“Sexual content, profanity and drug reference run rampant in TikTok videos,” Rokita said. “This kind of material threatens the mental and physical health of young Hoosiers.”

Rokita’s actions come as 14 states have prohibited government employees from using TikTok on their work devices and Congress considers a similar federal rule. “A separate bipartisan bill, which was introduced in Congress last week, would ban the app for everyone in the United States,” The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Interestingly, a third of political candidates vying for office in the 2022 election used a TikTok account, and Democrats have seemed to embrace the platform more readily than Republicans. The Statehouse File recently focused on the account run by the Indiana House Democratic Caucus.

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4 COMMENTS

  1. Merry Christmas folks!

    It SURE DOES LOOK LIKE Braun is heading to the Indiana Governor’s Mansion, and NOT Suzanne Crouch.

    Based on the number of articles we are seeing here at the City-County Observer on Braun.

    • FRUGAL:

      That is a legitimate and good question. Maybe I made a mistake, but I thought that comment was posted in a different article about Braun several days ago. It showed up here. Not meant for this Article.

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