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Texas turns TikTok's Restricted Mode promise into liability on summary judgment
Judge Cory Liu decided on the documents that TikTok told parents Restricted Mode kept graphic content out of a child's feed while its own moderation labels only made some of that content harder to find. Next month's trial covers what it owes.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- District Judge Cory Liu found that TikTok intentionally misled the public about its safety standards, and he decided the liability question on summary judgment.
- The state pleaded two tracks, the SCOPE Act on children and online platforms and the general consumer protection statute that turns a marketing promise into a legal obligation.
- Next month's trial covers civil penalties, statutory damages and a permanent injunction that could force changes to how the app works in Texas.
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Why it matters
- precedent A state can now reach the deception question on the paper trail alone, provided the marketing copy and the internal enforcement labels are both in writing.
- exposure Any product whose parental control demotes content and leaves it up is exposed on the sentence next to the switch as well as on its moderation outcomes.
- decision TikTok's options have narrowed: the liability finding stands, and paying now buys peace on top of it.
- cost Meta's 29-state deal averaged roughly $575m per state. A single-state finding can carry that order of magnitude before any injunction costs are counted.
A demotion and a block look much the same on a moderation dashboard. Both cut how often a video surfaces, and only one makes it unreachable. TikTok's internal sorting had a bucket for the first kind: material that broke its own community guidelines but got labelled "hard to find" instead of "do not allow". The video stayed up and stayed reachable, just less visible [5].
Texas built its case on the copy. Moderation quality never had to be litigated. Restricted Mode was promoted as the setting that would keep graphic material involving drugs, alcohol, nudity and violence away from a child's feed [3], and the state showed the court that children could still reach that material with the setting switched on [4]. Two statutes carried the claims, the SCOPE Act and the general consumer protection law, and the second is the one that turns a marketing promise into a legal obligation [8]. Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office brought the case in January 2025 [7], said TikTok "sacrificed the safety and innocence of children for engagement and numbers" [6].
The comparable cases all ended in money with the wrongdoing question left open. TikTok has never reached a jury and settled three more teen addiction cases recently [10]. It paid $400mn to the Justice Department over children's privacy [11]. Meta agreed to pay up to $16.68bn to settle with 29 states [12]; divide that by 29 and the average state took about $575m [19]. Meta is now defending the biggest consumer protection case in the country in front of a jury, where opening statements put the sum at issue at $193bn [18].
TikTok is not conceding. In earlier filings it argued that the SCOPE Act claims rest on an unconstitutional law and that federal children's privacy rules override the state's, according to reporting by the legal outlet MLex on those filings [13], and an appeal is expected [14]. The same Texas office has sued Netflix over alleged surveillance and addictive design and extracted more than $1bn from Meta in a separate settlement [15]. Florida has its own action against TikTok under its child social media law [16]. California has banned personalised feeds for under-16s [17].
Teams tell themselves a safety toggle reduces exposure, the metrics prove it, and the help centre wording is close enough. A parent uses it differently. They switch it on once, read the sentence next to the switch, and treat the result as a boundary.
The useful exercise is two columns per control. One column lists what the setting removes from the product. The other lists what it only ranks lower. Then the App Store copy, the onboarding string and the help centre page get marked against those columns. thenextweb.com's account of the ruling notes that a parental control which hides material is doing something different from what the marketing says [21]. That is the gap Judge Liu decided on the documents [2], and the internal label that created it was a product decision made inside a moderation tool [5].
The copy promises removal and the system can only demote. One of the two has to change before a state attorney general reads both.
What to watch
- The size of the civil penalty, and whether the injunction reaches Restricted Mode's ranking behaviour or only the words describing it.
- An appellate ruling on preemption could strip the SCOPE Act track and leave the consumer protection count standing alone.
- Whether other state attorneys general skip a bespoke child safety law and file on the general consumer protection statute.