Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday filed a lawsuit against TikTok this week alleging the platform misrepresented the nature of its content to secure favorable age ratings in app stores while designing features to keep young users engaged for as long as possible.

The complaint, filed in Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas under the Pennsylvania Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law, names TikTok Inc., TikTok Ltd., TikTok Pte. Ltd., TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, ByteDance Ltd. and ByteDance Inc. as defendants. It seeks a permanent injunction, restitution, civil penalties and other relief.

The suit centers on TikTok’s self-reported answers to Apple’s App Store age-rating questionnaire, in which the company described sexual content, profanity, drug references and mature themes on its platform as “infrequent/mild” across every category. Those answers resulted in a ‘12+’ rating under Apple’s prior system and a ‘13+’ rating under the current one. The complaint alleges the accurate rating would have been “17+” or “16+/18+,” which would trigger stricter parental controls on Apple devices.

“TikTok has built its empire based on a model of addictiveness at all costs, and expanded that empire using deception about what sort of content is viewable for kids,” Sunday said in a statement. “This is not an indictment against modern technology, or a scolding assessment of social media as a whole; rather, this is an action to hold accountable a company that values dollars over mental wellness.”

The complaint cites the Commonwealth’s own test-account investigation, which it says found frequent and intense examples of sexual content, profanity, drug references, and violent or self-harm-adjacent themes surfaced to accounts registered as 13-year-olds, including through the algorithmically driven For You Feed. It also alleges that TikTok’s Restricted Mode and Family Pairing parental-control tools fail to meaningfully limit that content, and that the company’s addictive design features, including autoplay, infinite scroll and variable-reward push notifications, were built with knowledge of their effects on adolescent users.

TikTok pushed back on the allegations. “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,” a spokesperson told NBC10, pointing to the platform’s 50 preset teen account safety settings and its Family Pairing tools.

The Pennsylvania Family Support Alliance, a child abuse prevention organization, said the suit raises fair questions but noted that “an age rating is not the same thing as developmental appropriateness.”

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