Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday announced a civil lawsuit against TikTok on Aug. 11, 2026, filed in Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas and accusing the social media platform of violating state consumer protection laws in ways that harm youth.
There are two central charges.
One is deceit: for example, making false statements about how much of TikTok’s content contains mature themes, and about the ability of its guardrails to protect youth from that content.
The second alleges that “TikTok knowingly created platform features intended to cause excessive, compulsive, and addictive use, despite knowing that young people are more susceptible to — and acutely harmed by — those features.” Those features include infinite scrolling, autoplay and push notifications designed to trigger the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that drives the brain’s reward system.
The company rejects the charges. In a statement to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a spokesperson for TikTok said, “This lawsuit relies on misleading and inaccurate claims and deliberately ignores the concrete safety measures TikTok has voluntarily implemented to support the well-being of our community.”
I’m a public policy professor, not a lawyer, so I won’t predict who’ll win in court. But after nearly 40 years studying how addictive products are marketed, I agree that goods and services that lead to compulsive behaviors — whether scrolling or smoking — deserve special scrutiny. However, they do not fall neatly into binaries such as being addictive or not, or dangerous for youth but safe for adults. Lawsuits that find defendants liable or not liable risk imposing black-and-white distinctions on trade-offs that require nuanced thinking.
Binary thinking doesn’t work
There is a long history of binary thinking about addictive goods.
Drugs such as heroin were seen as dangerous and bad, so they were banned.
Most everything else was good, or at least neutral. The government might tax and regulate, but traditionally it does not focus on protecting consumers from the consequences of overindulgence. The health department may regulate what goes into a doughnut, but not how many doughnuts go into you.
Free societies rightly presume that adults can manage their own affairs without government interference — but children are a different matter, and even adult freedom has exceptions.
Reality is closer to a continuum. Alcohol, nicotine and caffeine are psychoactive chemicals that can cause varying degrees of problems, but they were never lumped together with heroin. And even when cannabis was prohibited, neither sentencing guidelines nor the public equated its dangers with crack. The public was sophisticated enough to know that some drugs cause more harm.
Gambling also challenges black-and-white thinking. It triggers neural pathways similar to those activated by drug addiction, and the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual recognizes that it can produce compulsive, self-destructive behavior even without a drug involved. Yet no compulsion-inducing product — not even the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl — always induces addictive or self-destructive behavior. After all, many patients have “used” fentanyl during surgery.
Countries regulate gambling with that variation in mind. Until recent decades, the U.S. banned commercial sports betting. Japan limits casino visits to a set number per week or month. Norway permits gambling only via state monopolies aimed at preventing gambling problems and at funneling profits to nonprofits.
I’m not arguing that Japan’s or Norway’s gambling policies are right, or that the U.S. should follow Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia in blocking youth social media accounts. I’m only suggesting such actions merit real debate, not automatic dismissal.
Binary distinctions between bad and good don’t work because products and their features vary widely in how likely they are to cause regrettable, repetitive engagement. Free societies rightly presume that adults can manage their own affairs without government interference — but children are a different matter, and even adult freedom has exceptions.
Is TikTok engineered to addict?
PA’s lawsuit charges that TikTok is engineered to trap users and thereby maximize the time they spend generating revenue for the company. That is reminiscent of cigarette manufacturers intentionally modifying chemical formulations, such as adding ammonia compounds, to enhance the speed and efficiency of nicotine absorption to maintain user addiction.
On the other hand, keeping users continuously engaged — through casino floor design, gym membership contracts or automated billing for subscriptions — is a mainstream strategy across industries. Plenty of legal, respected organizations use it to maximize profit.
Likewise, reputable studies also find some degree of dopamine response to video games, milkshakes and even music. The intensity of that response is far lower than what drugs such as cocaine or heroin produce, but it illustrates that one should not leap from the mere existence of a dopamine response to a reflexive ban.
The TikTok suit could come to be seen as the beginning of an important new layer of public protection against compulsion-inducing product design.
Ideally, legislatures would strike a balance between freedom and protecting the minority who’d misuse it. But lately, state and national legislatures have been stalled by partisan division, swayed by commercial interests and reluctant to pass new restrictions.
When courts do the regulating
Given this legislative lethargy, state attorneys general sometimes step in to protect the public from companies that exploit compulsion-inducing products. Pittsburgh Public Schools made a similar case years before Sunday’s lawsuit: The district sued TikTok and other social media platforms in federal court, arguing the companies induced students to “compulsively use their services” and left the district to absorb the resulting mental health costs. That case, consolidated with similar suits from districts nationwide, ended when TikTok settled rather than go to trial this spring — a resolution that came just months before PA filed its own case making a similar addictive-by-design argument.
Important elements of modern tobacco control came not from Congress but from the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement. This agreement resolved lawsuits brought by state attorneys general against major cigarette manufacturers. It also eliminated cigarette billboard ads, cartoon mascots like Joe Camel, most free samples and tobacco-brand sponsorships, and it banned cigarette marketing aimed at youth. Congress didn’t give the FDA broad authority over tobacco until a decade later, in 2009.
The opioid crisis provides a more recent example. Settlements of lawsuits against opioid manufacturers, distributors and pharmacy chains imposed not only billion-dollar fines but also rules governing future conduct. Johnson & Johnson agreed to stop selling and promoting opioids for 10 years. Major drug distributors agreed to stronger systems for identifying suspicious wholesale opioid orders and sharing distribution data, while CVS, Walgreens and Walmart agreed to systems for flagging suspicious opioid prescriptions. Litigation accomplished some of the work ordinarily associated with regulation.
Regulation by litigation has drawbacks. Courts and attorneys general are no substitute for legislatures and expert regulatory agencies. But when conventional regulation fails to keep pace with powerful new products capable of inducing self-destructive, compulsive consumption, courts offer another route.
The path Attorney General Sunday has now opened may prove long and contentious, but the TikTok suit could come to be seen as the beginning of an important new layer of public protection against compulsion-inducing product design.
Jonathan Caulkins receives funding from The National Science Foundation and is an adjunct researcher with the RAND Corporation. The opinions expressed here are those of Caulkins alone, and do not reflect the views of either Carnegie Mellon University or RAND.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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