On January 8, 2025, TikTok’s familiar logo appeared in the Google Pixel app store, a symbol of the platform’s global reach and immense popularity among young users. But behind the scenes, a storm was brewing. In courtrooms from North Carolina to Minnesota and even Los Angeles, TikTok now faces mounting legal challenges that could reshape not only its operations in the United States but also the broader conversation around social media’s influence on youth and free speech.
In North Carolina, a newly unsealed video has become the centerpiece of a high-profile lawsuit against TikTok, revealing internal anxieties among current and former employees about the app’s impact on young people’s mental health. As reported by CNN, the footage—compiled from internal meetings of uncertain date—shows employees wrestling with the uncomfortable reality that what keeps users glued to TikTok isn’t always what’s best for them. One employee is seen admitting, “We, in a sense, encourage the publication of some of this content precisely because of how the platform is designed. And sometimes that worries me.” The employee adds, “That is literally what we’re all here for: to help make the content ecosystem more diverse and to make TikTok a place where you can get a lot of different content, through which you would never want to leave.”
These candid moments, unsealed by North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Adam Conrad on August 19, 2025, have fueled the state’s lawsuit—originally filed by former Attorney General Josh Stein and now championed by his successor, Jeff Jackson. The suit alleges that TikTok was engineered to be “extremely addictive for minors,” and that the company misled both parents and children about the risks. Jackson told CNN, “These videos prove that social media companies keep children hooked to maximize profits, even at the expense of their health.” The legal action seeks financial penalties and an injunction to halt what the state calls unfair and deceptive practices.
In response, TikTok has pushed back, calling the lawsuit “inaccurate and misleading.” The company points to a raft of safety features rolled out in recent years—basic privacy settings, nighttime notification restrictions, and new parental controls. But the unsealed video, which Justice Conrad ruled should not be kept from public view, has thrown a harsh spotlight on the company’s internal deliberations and the broader ethical dilemmas facing tech giants.
Meanwhile, Minnesota has joined the chorus of states taking TikTok to court. On August 19, 2025, Attorney General Keith Ellison announced a sweeping lawsuit alleging the platform violates state consumer protection laws by exploiting the “unfinished reward system in our children’s brains” with addictive algorithms. “TikTok has created a dangerously addictive platform that exploits the unfinished reward system in our children’s brains,” Ellison said at a press conference, according to the Minnesota Reformer.
The Minnesota lawsuit details how TikTok’s infinite scroll and personalized recommendations keep young users endlessly engaged. It also highlights the app’s beauty filters, which, according to an internal report cited in the suit, are turned on by default for teens—even though the company knows adolescents are “more susceptible” to negative effects like body dysmorphia and eating disorders. Perhaps most alarming, the lawsuit singles out TikTok’s 2019 “LIVE” feature, describing it as an unregulated marketplace that “can be used for sexual exploitation.” The suit alleges, “Operating in part like a virtual strip club, LIVE allows young streamers to turn their homes into a performance stage, and allows other users to entice streamers into sexual acts in exchange for virtual money.”
Ellison’s office is seeking $25,000 per violation—a sum that could balloon given TikTok’s massive teen user base. The lawsuit also draws a pointed comparison to Big Tobacco, dubbing TikTok “digital nicotine” and invoking the playbook that led to billions in damages against cigarette companies in the 1990s. Minnesota joins a coalition of 13 states that filed similar suits in October 2024, with Ellison emphasizing that the goal is to make TikTok obey the law, regardless of who owns the company. “It’s an unfair thing to expect that a kid can overcome the pressures and the design features and the research and the brain science of some of the most highly trained people in the world,” Ellison said.
TikTok, for its part, maintains that the lawsuits are “based on misleading and inaccurate claims that fail to recognize the robust safety measures TikTok has voluntarily implemented.” The company highlights built-in safety features for teen accounts, along with parental controls for screen time, content, and privacy. But as of August 2025, the legal battles are only intensifying, with TikTok facing challenges not just from state attorneys general but also from the federal government. Congress and President Joe Biden signed a law requiring TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest the app. The Supreme Court upheld the law in January, but actual enforcement has been delayed, with the latest deadline set for September 17, 2025.
Amid these regulatory storms, TikTok is also defending itself from a very different kind of lawsuit—this one from the notorious Tate brothers. Andrew and Tristan Tate, dual U.S.-British citizens and former boxers, filed suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court in August 2025, accusing TikTok and Meta of defamation and unlawful “deplatforming” after their accounts were banned in 2022 for violating community guidelines. The brothers, who face charges of human trafficking and rape in Romania and the U.K.—charges they deny—claim the bans were part of a coordinated campaign to silence them and destroy their reputations.
The lawsuits, as reported by NBC News, allege that the platforms’ actions were not neutral enforcement of terms of use but a deliberate effort to suppress “two controversial but law-abiding men.” The Tates argue that their removals were done “without notice or explanation” and that these actions caused “substantial and irreplaceable financial loss and damage.” They further contend that TikTok and Meta enabled defamation by “refusing to clarify or support” the reasons for banning their accounts, allowing “widespread media narratives to suggest criminality.”
Andrew Tate, who has described his online persona as an “online character,” took to X (formerly Twitter) to declare, “It’s good vs evil and I will lose my entire fortune in this fight. I’m happy to go broke and live on the street trying to beat The Matrix.” The brothers are seeking more than $50 million in compensatory damages from each company. As of August 2025, their lawsuits are pending, and neither TikTok nor Meta has commented publicly on the litigation.
With legal battles raging on multiple fronts, TikTok finds itself at the crossroads of urgent debates about youth mental health, platform accountability, and free speech. The outcomes of these cases could set precedents for how social media companies operate—and how society balances innovation, safety, and expression in the digital age.
