North Carolina courts shouldn’t be allowed to hand down a decision that could affect millions of social media users well outside the state, lawyers for TikTok told state Supreme Court justices Wednesday.
They’re seeking to end a state-level trial into allegations that the short-form video social media platform has addictive properties aimed at getting children and other young users to spend as much time as possible on the app.
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North Carolina and multiple other states are suing TikTok and its parent company, Bytedance Inc., in the case. But unlike some similar lawsuits — such as one that TikTok competitor Meta recently settled — the TikTok trial isn’t happening in federal court.
TikTok says that’s wrong, and it’s asking for the state case to be shut down — possibly forcing the challengers to start from scratch in a new lawsuit in California, where TikTok is based in the U.S., or in federal courts, or potentially another country. TikTok lists Los Angeles and Singapore as its global headquarters and has offices in Berlin, Dubai, Dublin, Jakarta, London, Mexico City, New York, Paris, Sao Paulo, San Jose, Seoul, Sydney and Tokyo. Bytedance is based in China.
“We are operating a nationally or internationally accessible website or app,” TikTok lawyer Jonathan Hacker told the justices Wednesday, adding that merely operating a website that’s accessible by people anywhere doesn’t allow a company to be sued anywhere.
Justice Richard Dietz questioned whether that argument was underselling TikTok’s actions. It doesn’t simply allow North Carolina residents to access the app, he said. The company also uses an algorithm, deployed in North Carolina, to target North Carolina residents with customized ads and other actions.
“An algorithm is using the information that it’s gathering by enticing the user to do certain things in order to build a profile, target ads, and so on,” Dietz said. “... That does seem very different than just someone going to a website.”
The attempt to end the state-level case comes after a major procedural win for North Carolina and the other states last year. State Superior Court Judge Adam Conrad issued a ruling that allowed the states to use evidence of internal video calls TikTok employees had recorded, showing the social media giant’s staff discussing its potentially addicting properties in frank terms.
TikTok, like other social media companies sued over similar allegations, has publicly defended its product as being safe for young people. But those video clips show that, in private, employees were raising serious concerns, CNN reported when the video was unsealed and made public last year.
“Unfortunately, some of the stuff that people find interesting are not always the most healthy,” Nicholas Chng, a former TikTok employee focused on risk detection, said in the video. “We do, in a way, encourage some of this content being put up just because of the way the platform is designed. And sometimes I worry about that.”
As that and other evidence has piled up in state court, TikTok is seeking to end the state-level trial entirely. That’s what Wednesday’s hearing in the state Supreme Court was about.
During oral arguments, the justices held their cards close to the vest. Seven of the nine didn’t speak; only Dietz and Justice Allison Riggs asked questions. Dietz grilled attorneys for both sides at length on possible holes in their arguments.
Josh Abram, a consumer rights attorney for North Carolina Attorney Jeff Jackson’s office, handled the oral arguments for the states.
He framed TikTok’s arguments as little more than an attempt to avoid accountability — saying that if the court allows the case to be dismissed here, then the company might continue making similar arguments in other states, too, until it can move the case to courts in China, where ByteDance is based.
“ByteDance would like us to sue in California, or perhaps in China, but their preference is not binding,” Abram said. “The state is allowed to choose any form that has jurisdiction, and the Constitution does not require the state to bring this case in California or Chinese courts. Our own courts can decide our own state's laws.”
Before being elected governor, North Carolina’s then-Attorney General Josh Stein sued TikTok in 2024 — accusing the app of harming children and teens. Stein was joined by other attorneys general in 11 states and Washington D.C. in filing the bipartisan lawsuit.
"TikTok has long known that the platform is not safe for children,” Stein said in 2024. “In internal records obtained by the attorneys general, TikTok’s employees repeatedly told leadership about the dangers of the app for kids and tried to suggest helpful changes to make it safer – but TikTok’s leaders refused to make those changes because young users are valuable for TikTok’s business model.”
Other states such as Pennsylvania have also sued TikTok since this lawsuit was filed, alleging the platform promotes "endless scrolling" that harms the mental health of children and that it lied about how often adult material appeared on its feeds to keep its 13+ age rating in app stores.
The courtroom debate on Wednesday focused largely on technical and procedural legal issues. Spokespeople for TikTok and Bytedance didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the broader allegations about social media addiction — or on whether the company might consider settling with the states to end the lawsuit, as Meta did earlier this month in a similar addiction lawsuit.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, agreed to pay as much as $17 billion to a group of states including North Carolina and to make numerous technical changes to its software aimed at teen users. It will block children from accessing beauty filters critics said were harmful to mental health, limit their time spent on the app, shut down access for young users entirely late at night, enact stricter age limit checks and more.
TikTok’s legal argument against its trial continuing in North Carolina also claims that doing so would set a negative precedent for businesses that are actually based in North Carolina, opening them up to lawsuits in other states under those different states’ laws.
“It is a double-edged sword that ultimately threatens North Carolina and the local business community,” the company wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court. “If other states adopt the state's sweeping theory, any North Carolina business that operates online or speaks to the public could be hauled into the court of any state, from Hawaii to California to Texas to New York.”
Abrams, arguing on behalf of the state, said TikTok is just trying to drag out the lawsuit and avoid accountability by seeking to keep changing the venue. It’s a common strategy other social media companies have tried in similar cases, he said.
“That’s not fair, that's not due process, and internet companies have tried this before,” Abram said.
The arguments come weeks after TikTok and Bytedance agreed to pay $400 million to settle allegations related to compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in a separate lawsuit.
Since the federal government filed that complaint in 2024, TikTok has made significant changes to its compliance functions and privacy practices, the U.S. Justice Department said in a statement last month.
“The company has implemented extensive measures designed to strengthen safeguards for younger users, improve age-related controls, and enhance parental oversight,” the DOJ said. “Those developments have materially advanced the public interests underlying the department’s litigation and have strengthened protections for millions of American families.”