Utah is not the first state to take legal action: Indiana launched a similar lawsuit against TikTok last year, a Maryland school district sued the app in June, and Montana has signed a bill banning the app from 2024. Yet, ultimately, these lawsuits seem motivated by espionage, surveillance and data-sharing fears rather than concerns over children’s mental health. A growing distrust of China — one of the only things that Democrats and Republicans seem to have in common — means that more and more senators are backing bipartisan legislation to give President Biden new powers to ban the app on national security grounds. 

These fears may be warranted, but from a safeguarding perspective, bans will not help protect children’s mental health. When India banned TikTok in 2020 over security concerns, it simply led to the creation of copycat apps and a surge in Instagram users; a ban in America would inevitably lead to the same thing. An outright ban is unlikely to solve America’s data privacy problems, has serious implications for the First Amendment, and will ultimately do nothing to reduce children’s screen times. Instead, it is just a single move in a wider geopolitical game, and one which they may not legally be able to see through.

If US states want to target TikTok specifically, they should perhaps focus less on its impact on mental health (which many social media companies are responsible for), and instead on its numerous data breaches. TikTok has already been fined for breaching child privacy regulations by the EU, UK and the US, and its poor track record makes it uniquely culpable and unreliable. One option might be to introduce age-verification legislation for TikTok (as has been done for pornography websites) which might help quell fears about children’s data. When it comes to tackling youth addictions to screens though, we are still a long way from weaning them off, and removing one drug will just make them seek another.