Fucking obviously duh its knowingly designed to be addictive and they know it brainrots you.
TikTok’s own research states that “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” according to the suit.
This is the real reason that TikTok should be massively regulated or outright banned for children, not because of specifically oh we we are worried about data security concerns with a Chinese company, but because its functionally a digital version of a mind melting harmful drug.
If you want to be consistent on the data security concept, then basically you'd have to apply that logic to Facebook and Instagram and well pretty much everything these days.
But also, I guarantee you that if Meta or Twitter/X was investigated similarly we'd find out very very similar things about their products intentionally being designed to be addictive and that they know they degenerate your mental faculties as well, and prioritize spreading dubious inflammatory misinformation.
(Well, in Twitter, now X's case, probably Elon has already destroyed much of that research after he took over, and X now has different and even worse obvious problems.)
Cambridge Analytica anyone?
Tiktok is only different in that it is primarily aimed at children, and that it's not American.
I am so beyond tired of pretending that modern corporate social media apps are anything other than extremely societally normalized drugs that make us all stupid angry idiots.
EDIT, several days later:
Oh hey look here's Sam Seder agreeing with the idea that these platforms are products and they should be regulated akin to alcohol and tobacco and harmful pharmaceuticals, who also all had their own internal data showing they knew their products were/are addictive and damaging but just shelved their own studies: