TikTok, it seems, cannot keep itself away from controversies. Leaks have shown that the ByteDance-owned company was aware that its feed is addictive and it kept it deliberately in order to keep people hooked to the app.

For context, earlier this month, over a dozen US states sued TikTok alleging that the popular short video app was duping the public about its safety. The states also allege that TikTok’s algorithm is designed in a way that children remain hooked to it. TikTok’s virtual digital currency was also mentioned in the lawsuit, arguing that it was used to manipulate children.

Kentucky was among the states that filed the lawsuit. Its leaked lawsuit said that TikTok deliberately designed its algorithm to make it addictive. The information, which was later redacted, was revealed inadvertently by Kentucky’s attorney general’s office. It was first reported by Kentucky Public Radio and later shared by other media outlets.

TikTok Puts a Number to Addiction

The unredacted lawsuit alleged that the user gets addicted to TikTok – or what the company calls the “habit moment” – when they have watched 260 or more videos during the first week of having a TikTok account. Since some of the videos are as short as 8 seconds, the complaint alleges, “Thus, in under 35 minutes, an average user is likely to become addicted to the platform.”

If that was not all, TikTok allegedly reduced the number of “unattractive” people in “For You feed” through an algorithm change.

“By changing the TikTok algorithm to show fewer ‘not attractive subjects’ in the For You feed, Defendants took active steps to promote a narrow beauty norm even though it could negatively impact their young users,” said Kentucky’s complaint.

Notably, social media companies deploy algorithms that ensure that users remain hooked to the platform for long. An unnamed TikTok executive bluntly said, that kids watch TikTok because the app’s algorithm keeps them away from “sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at someone in the eyes.”

TikTok is easily worth 10s of billions of dollars because of its fanatical user base of over 170 million Americans. However, the TikTok content recommendation algorithm, credited with much of the platform’s success, might be so valuable that ByteDance (and the Chinese government, if it steps in) may simply let the platform get banned instead of selling it to US competitors.

TikTok Did Not Have Adequate Moderation Mechanism

Citing internal communication, the lawsuit alleges that TikTok finds its content moderation metrics as largely misleading” because “we are good at moderating the content we capture, but these metrics do not account for the content that we miss.”

Notably, TikTok recently laid off hundreds of employees and many of these were in its content moderation team as the popular app is moving to artificial intelligence (AI) content moderation. In its statement, it said, “We’re making these changes as part of our ongoing efforts to further strengthen our global operating model for content moderation.”

AI is finding its way across various business functions and while some of these might sound bizarre and a section of the market believes that the technology is a bubble, AI is widely expected to help automate several business functions.

Meanwhile, as expected, TikTok has tried to brush aside the serious issues that the leaked lawsuit reveals and, in its response, it said, “Unfortunately, this complaint cherry-picks misleading quotes and takes outdated documents out of context to misrepresent our commitment to community safety.”

Children Were Being Sexually Exploited on TikTok

TikTok is also under fire for its poor content moderation and rules around underage users. A Forbes investigation in 2022 found that teens were being sexually exploited on the platform and kids below 15 were stripping on the platform in exchange for both virtual and real currency.

To be sure, TikTok’s policy bars those under 16 from hosting live streams. Also, the company bars explicit sexual activities on the platform. One of its policies states, “Showing semi-nudity of adults, such as wearing only nipple covers or underwear that does not cover the majority of the buttocks,” is barred on the platform.

Similarly, “Showing adults engaging in intimate kissing, sexualized framing, or sexualized behavior” is prohibited on TikTok. This basically means that teens on TikTok livestream were doing activities that even adults are barred from doing on the platform. Nevertheless, Forbes found that minors were being taken advantage of through the platform, indicating that TikTok’s moderation is woefully insufficient.

As Leah Plunkett, an assistant dean at Harvard Law School and faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society aptly compared these livestreams to “the digital equivalent of going down the street to a strip club filled with 15-year-olds.” Plunkett added, “That is sexual exploitation. But that’s exactly what TikTok is doing here.”

Is There a Political Will to Act Against Social Media Companies?

US politicians are finally starting to realize the harm caused by the various social media giants. In his State of the Union Address in 2022, President Joe Biden said, “we must hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit.”

He added, “It’s time to strengthen privacy protections; ban targeted advertising to children, demand tech companies stop collecting personal data on our children.”

Talks of banning TikTok in the US have been around for 4 years which coincides with the runup to the 2020 US presidential elections where incumbent Donald Trump took a hard line on China. However, the motivation behind the attempted ban was data security and not general harm as TikTok is obligated to assist the Chinese government with intelligence operations if it is requested.

Trump issued an executive order in August 2020 that gave TikTok 90 days to either sell its US assets to a US-based company or shut its operations in the country. However, Trump lost his election and a TikTok ban went into cold storage even though the country subsequently banned federal employees from using the app on state devices.

Trump more recently flipped on the TikTok ban, arguing that it would just help Facebook, which he hates because he believes it interfered with the 2020 election by moderating the Hunter Biden laptop story. He also may have changed his mind after Jeff Yass, a major investor in ByteDance with a 15% stake, started donating large amounts of money to Trump’s election efforts. Trump is well known for these kinds of (allegedly) corrupt quid-pro-quo deals.

US Wants ByteDance to Trim Its Stake

In April this year, President Joe Biden signed into law the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act that calls for a ban on TikTok unless Bytedance sells its stake.

However, the company has challenged the ban on grounds of the “First Amendment” and has been vociferously denying that it’s a national security threat to the US – or for that matter any other country.

Meanwhile, with the Forbes investigation showing TikTok becoming a literal “strip club” and Kentucky’s lawsuit alleging that TikTok deliberately made its feed addictive, the case for banning TikTok could only grow stronger.

That said, the case for banning TikTok in the US is quite nuanced. Many critics of the law to ban TikTok claim that the real motivation was to eliminate TikTok’s free exchange of information to stop Americans from learning from non-establishment sources. For example, Senator Mitt Romney seemed to indicate that Congress’s overwhelming support for the bill was due to the desire to crush dissent against Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza.

Also, while many politicians support banning TikTok, they use the platform to connect with voters. Also, ahead of the US presidential elections, no side looks keen to ban the app which is hugely popular among users – most of whom happen to be quite young.