Lawsuit names infinite scroll, autoplay, and push notifications as hooks
Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday filed a civil lawsuit against TikTok on Aug. 11, 2026, in Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas, accusing the social media platform of violating state consumer protection laws by designing features that induce compulsive use among young people. The case adds Pennsylvania to a growing wave of state and local litigation targeting social media companies over product design alleged to harm minors.
The complaint advances two charges. The first alleges deceit: that TikTok made false statements about how much of its content contains mature themes and overstated the effectiveness of its youth-safety guardrails. 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.” Features cited in the lawsuit include infinite scrolling, autoplay, and push notifications, all described as designed to trigger the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that drives the brain’s reward system.
TikTok rejected the allegations. In a statement to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a company spokesperson said the 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.”
The suit arrives against a backdrop of similar litigation. Pittsburgh Public Schools had earlier 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 suits from districts nationwide, ended earlier this spring when TikTok settled rather than go to trial — a resolution that came just months before Sunday filed Pennsylvania’s case making a similar addictive-by-design argument.
Carnegie Mellon public policy professor Jonathan Caulkins, who is not involved in the litigation, argued in a commentary republished from The Conversation by UPI that the case forces a reckoning with how society categorizes compulsion-inducing products. “Goods and services that lead to compulsive behaviors — whether scrolling or smoking — deserve special scrutiny,” Caulkins wrote. “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.”
Caulkins, who said he has studied addictive-product marketing for nearly 40 years, pointed to gambling as a parallel. The American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual recognizes gambling can produce compulsive, self-destructive behavior even without a drug involved, he wrote, noting that countries regulate gambling with that variation in mind: Japan limits casino visits to a set number per week or month, Norway permits gambling only via state monopolies, and the United States banned commercial sports betting until recent decades.
The commentary also pointed to the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between state attorneys general and major cigarette manufacturers as a model of how courts can produce regulation that legislatures have not. That agreement 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 did not grant the FDA broad authority over tobacco until a decade later, in 2009.
More recently, opioid litigation produced both billion-dollar fines and conduct rules, Caulkins wrote. 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 CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart agreed to systems for flagging suspicious opioid prescriptions.
“Regulation by litigation has drawbacks. Courts and attorneys general are no substitute for legislatures and expert regulatory agencies,” Caulkins wrote. “But when conventional regulation fails to keep pace with powerful new products capable of inducing self-destructive, compulsive consumption, courts offer another route.”
He said the path Sunday has opened “may prove long and contentious” but could come to be seen as “the beginning of an important new layer of public protection against compulsion-inducing product design.”