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Texas sued TikTok in federal court in Galveston in October 2024 under a state law requiring parental consent for minors' accounts, then followed with a second suit over how the platform markets itself to children.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a lawsuit against TikTok on October 3, 2024, filed in federal district court in Galveston. The claim is not about foreign ownership or national security. It is a consumer protection case about what the platform does with children's data and whether parents can see or stop it.
A second Texas action followed in January 2025 over how TikTok markets itself to minors. Together they are the clearest test yet of whether a state can regulate a recommendation system through consumer protection law.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Caption | State of Texas v. TikTok |
| Filed | October 3, 2024, in federal district court in Galveston |
| Statute | Texas Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act (SCOPE Act) |
| Relief sought | Civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation, plus injunctive relief |
| Second action | January 2025, over marketing the platform as safe for minors |
| Docket number | Not confirmed from a primary source for this update. Pull it from the docket before citing. |
The SCOPE Act requires digital service providers to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting or sharing a known minor's personal identifying information, and to give verified parents tools to supervise a minor's account.
The state's complaint, summarized by the Texas Attorney General's office and analyzed by Hunton, alleges three failures. TikTok shared minors' personal identifying information with other users and with third parties including business partners and search engines. It did not use a commercially reasonable method to verify that a person claiming to be a parent actually was one. And it did not give verified parents the supervision tools the statute requires.
The second suit reaches further, into whether TikTok represented itself as appropriate for younger users, including through an age rating in app stores that the state says understated the risk.
Three questions stack on top of each other, and each one is genuinely contested.
Does the First Amendment protect algorithmic curation? TikTok's strongest defense is that arranging and recommending content is editorial judgment, which is protected expression. Moody v. NetChoice in 2024 confirmed that a platform's content moderation decisions can be protected editorial activity. Texas answers that this case is about data handling and parental consent, not about which videos get shown, and that a disclosure and consent requirement is a regulation of conduct.
Is the claim really about content? Section 230 bars claims that treat a service as the publisher of third-party content. A data-sharing and parental-consent claim sits outside that bar, at least in theory. The line gets blurry when the alleged harm is what the recommendation system served to a child.
Does federal law preempt the state statute? The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act covers children under 13 and includes a preemption provision. The SCOPE Act reaches minors more broadly, which is either a gap the state may fill or a conflict with the federal scheme, depending on who is arguing.
Consumer protection actions brought by state attorneys general often start in state court and get removed. This one was filed in federal district court, which means the docket is on PACER and the record is retrievable the ordinary way. That is not true of every case in this family. The parallel Texas action filed in January 2025 and the many state court suits against social platforms nationwide leave no PACER trail at all.
If you are tracking this litigation seriously, keep that split in mind. The federal docket shows one part of a much larger picture.
Watch for a motion to dismiss on First Amendment and preemption grounds. That motion is where the case gets decided in practical terms, because a ruling on it will tell every other state whether this statutory model survives.
Watch the penalty math. Ten thousand dollars per violation, applied to a user base of millions of minors, produces a number no defendant can treat as a cost of doing business. That is the leverage behind any settlement.
And watch the other states. Several have passed statutes modeled on the SCOPE Act. A ruling here will be cited in all of them.
Pull the current filings here: State of Texas v. TikTok. Motions to dismiss in constitutional challenges generate long briefing schedules with amicus filings from both directions, so case alerts are worth setting if you need to catch them as they land.
Reading the statute is more useful than reading commentary about it.
Digital service providers must obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting, processing, or sharing a known minor's personal identifying information.
They must give verified parents tools to supervise a minor's use of the service, including the ability to review settings and restrict purchases.
They must use a commercially reasonable method to verify that a person claiming to be a parent or guardian actually is one. That obligation is the one most likely to generate technical disputes, because there is no settled definition of what is commercially reasonable.
Penalties run to $10,000 per violation, and the attorney general enforces the statute directly rather than through a private right of action.
The January 2025 action is a deceptive trade practices case rather than a data case. Its theory is that the platform represented itself as appropriate for younger users, including through app store age ratings, while internal knowledge indicated otherwise.
That theory does not depend on the SCOPE Act at all, which matters if the SCOPE Act is enjoined on constitutional grounds. Filing both is a hedge, and a deliberate one.
The private-plaintiff version of the same argument, that platform design rather than platform content is the defect, is consolidated in a federal MDL we cover in the social media adolescent addiction litigation and in the MDL 3047 case status. For a different fight over what a platform owes users whose data it collects, read the website tracking and ECPA litigation.