Credit: Jernej Furman from Slovenia A Texas judge ruled on Thursday that TikTok broke state law by telling parents its app was safe for their children while knowing that it was not. District Judge Cory Liu found that the company had intentionally misled the public about its safety standards, and he decided it on summary judgment, meaning he did not think the question needed a jury. ikTok promoted Restricted Mode as the setting that would keep graphic material involving drugs, alcohol, nudity, and violence away from a child’s feed. Texas showed the court that children could still reach that material with the setting switched on. The state also pointed to how TikTok sorted content internally: some things that broke its own community guidelines were filed as “hard to find” rather than “do not allow”, which left them on the platform and reachable, just less visible.
Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office brought the case in January 2025, said TikTok “sacrificed the safety and innocence of children for engagement and numbers”. The claims ran on two tracks: the SCOPE Act, the Texas law on children and online platforms, and the state’s general consumer protection statute, which is the one that turns a marketing promise into a legal obligation. What makes this different from the last two years of child safety litigation is the shape of the outcome. These cases almost always end in a payment with no admission attached.
TikTok has never reached a jury, settling three more teen addiction cases only recently. It paid $400mn to the Justice Department over children’s privacy. Meta agreed to pay up to $16.68bn to settle with 29 states. In each of those, the company wrote a cheque, and the question of whether it had actually done anything wrong went unanswered.
Here it has been answered. Liability is established. The trial scheduled for next month is not about whether TikTok deceived anyone but about what it owes for having done so, which covers civil penalties, statutory damages and a permanent injunction that could force changes to how the app works in Texas. A settlement now would be a settlement on top of a finding, not instead of one.
TikTok has not accepted any of this. In earlier filings, it argued that the SCOPE Act claims rest on a law that is unconstitutional and that federal children’s privacy rules override the state’s, according to reporting by the legal outlet MLex on those filings. An appeal is widely expected. Texas has become the busiest state in this area by some distance.
The same office has sued Netflix over alleged surveillance and addictive design, and it extracted more than $1bn from Meta in a separate settlement. Florida has its own action against TikTok under its child social media law, and California has just banned personalised feeds for under-16s. The pressure is arriving from several directions at once, and it is no longer only about money. The ruling also lands while the broader argument is being tested in front of juries elsewhere.
Meta is in court in the biggest consumer protection case in the country, where opening statements put the sum at issue at $193bn. What Texas has shown is that a state does not need to wait for a jury to reach the liability question, provided the paper trail is clear enough. Judge Liu decided this one on the documents. The detail worth holding onto is the filing system.
A platform that labels rule-breaking content “hard to find” has not removed it, and a parental control that hides material rather than blocking it is doing something different from what the marketing says. That gap between the promise and the switch is what the court decided was deceptive, and it is a gap that exists in more products than this one.
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