Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has won a court ruling finding TikTok liable for misrepresenting the safety of its platform to parents and for exposing children to inappropriate content, his office announced Sept. 10. The attorney general’s office said the decision makes Texas the first state in the nation to hold the social media company liable on those grounds.
District Judge Cory Liu found that TikTok lied about its safety standards and concealed the prevalence of inappropriate and explicit material on the app, according to the release. The company had claimed it would remove graphic videos depicting drugs, nudity, alcohol, injuries and profanity, but such videos remained accessible to minors even under the platform’s “Restricted Mode,” the office said.
The ruling stems from a January 2025 lawsuit in which Paxton accused TikTok of deceptively marketing the app as safe for minors despite regularly showing them inappropriate and explicit material, the release said. The attorney general’s office had previously sued the company under the Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment Act, known as the SCOPE Act, alleging TikTok operated its platform in a way that put the online safety and privacy of Texas children at risk.
“TikTok sacrificed the safety and innocence of children for engagement and numbers, and now they are being held accountable,” Paxton said in the release. “Texas is now the first state in the nation to hold TikTok liable for lying to parents about the safety of its platform and exposing children to harmful content.”
Paxton added that he would “continue to go after TikTok and every social media company that exposes children to predators, inappropriate content, addictive features, or any other dangerous aspect of their platforms,” saying he would “never stop fighting to protect Texas children.”
The finding of liability does not end the case. The attorney general’s office said it will now proceed to trial against TikTok, where relief and penalties will be determined, and that the trial is expected to be set for next month.
The office said the full ruling is available through a link posted with the release. The action is the latest in a series of consumer protection and technology cases from Paxton’s office, which announced in August that it had secured more than $1 billion from Meta in what it described as a historic settlement protecting Texas children, and which in the same month sued Amazon over advertising auction practices.