TikTok attempts to duck Hawaii child safety lawsuit

TikTok wants Hawaii’s state lawsuit accusing TikTok of deliberately addicting children dismissed, or at least moved to federal court.

by Jeremy Yurow, Court House News, May 21, 2026

HONOLULU (CN) — Attorneys for TikTok and the state of Hawaii clashed Thursday over whether one of the state’s most significant attempts to regulate social media should be thrown out before it ever reaches trial.

Attorney General Anne Lopez accused the social media giant in December of using manipulative design features to addict minors while publicly portraying the platform as safe for children.

The state cited internal company documents it says show executives knew about the harms and prioritized profit anyway. Hawaii seeks fines of up to $10,000 per violation of its consumer protection law, potentially totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.

But TikTok attorney Aaron Henson argued to Oahu First Circuit Court Judge Kevin Morikone that the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, known as COPPA, bars Hawaii from bringing its data privacy claims in state court altogether.

“COPPA controls venue — states have to sue in federal court,” Henson said. “There’s a notice requirement: states have to notify the federal government to allow it the opportunity to intervene in the action.”

He argued that COPPA imposes a comprehensive framework on state enforcement actions, limiting available remedies and requiring states to file in federal court, none of which Hawaii had done.

He noted that the federal government has its own parallel action pending against TikTok and ByteDance in federal court in Southern California, underscoring his point that the state had chosen the wrong forum entirely. He also dismissed the state’s argument that it was bringing a state law claim rather than a direct COPPA claim, calling it a distinction without a difference.

“If all a state needed to do was call the claim something else,” Henson said, “that would make no sense and would undermine the purpose of the statute.”

Wayne Wagner, with Honolulu-based firm Goodsill Anderson Quinn & Stifel representing TikTok, urged the court to rule that several categories of TikTok’s public statements about safety were too vague to constitute actionable deception under Hawaii’s Unfair or Deceptive Acts or Practices law, even if the court declined to dismiss the case outright.

“The most fundamental element is that the representation or omission at issue must be a fact,” Wagner said.

He cited In re Social Media Cases for the proposition that to be actionable, a statement must be specific, measurable and capable of being proven true or false. General assurances that TikTok was safe for teens, he said, cleared none of those bars.

Wagner said the only statements in the state’s deception theory that were genuinely factual, those relating to data collection of children under 13, were the same claims Henson argued were preempted by COPPA.

Douglas Chin, the former Hawaii attorney general now serving as special deputy attorney general in the case, focused his argument on the day-to-day reality of how TikTok operates in the state.

“Hawaii consumers affirmatively log into TikTok’s platform, and then TikTok extracts their personal data, tracks how much time they spend there and what they look at, sells that information to advertisers for profit, and then harms them, exploits them and addicts them, so that they will keep using the platform more and more,” Chin said.

He told Morikone it was entirely reasonable for TikTok to expect to face a Hawaii court, “after more than a dozen other state courts have all decided that they can have TikTok answer under their state laws for harms to their state consumers.”

Chin also challenged the mechanism TikTok chose for its attack on the complaint, arguing that a motion to dismiss was the wrong vehicle for trying to excise specific categories of statements from the case.

If TikTok wanted to target particular passages, he said, it should have brought a motion to strike, which would have required it to identify the specific language it wanted removed.

Attorney Dean Kawamoto also told the court that TikTok’s reading of COPPA would effectively write the word “inconsistent” out of the statute entirely.

“In enacting COPPA, Congress decided only to preempt inconsistent actions, not all actions,” Kawamoto said. “COPPA only preempts actions that impose liability that is inconsistent with the act, in other words, holding a defendant liable for conduct that is lawful under COPPA.”

He pointed to the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Jones v. Google, which he said held that COPPA does not bar state law causes of action that are parallel to, or prescribe the same conduct forbidden by, the federal statute.

Kawamoto also pushed back on any suggestion that courts had uniformly sided with TikTok on similar arguments, telling Judge Morikone that more than two dozen state trial courts had addressed the same Section 230 and First Amendment questions raised by the defense Thursday.

“No court has done what TikTok is asking this court to do,” Kawamoto said, “completely dismiss the state’s claims at this stage.”

Morikone said he will rule via minute order, directing the prevailing party to prepare an appropriate order.