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A Global Message to TikTok: Stop Your Profit Model of 'Toxic and Addictive' Content for Kids
"TikTok must make its platform safe for children and young people to socialize, learn and access information and not be harmed."
Nov 25, 2025
A group of digital activists is set to deliver a message to social media giant TikTok on Tuesday to clean up its "toxic and addictive" business model.
The petition, which has more than 170,000 signatures and is being circulated by human rights watchdog Amnesty International, will be delivered to TikTok's office in Dublin, Ireland by activists Mary Kate Harten and Trinity Kendi of Ireland; Abril Perazzini of Argentina; and Noe Hamon of France.
In the petition, Amnesty accuses TikTok of becoming "a space that is more and more toxic and addictive," and can potentially harm the "self-image, mental health, well-being of younger users."
Amnesty International campaigner Zahra Asif Razvi said that the petition is demanding that TikTok completely redo its business model to be built around user safety.
"These signatures represent a global demand for TikTok to replace its current business model of an app that is addictive by design with one that is safe by design," she said. "TikTok must make its platform safe for children and young people to socialize, learn and access information and not be harmed."
The human rights group says that its own research released last month shows that TikTok prioritizes user engagement over safety, and will often send young users to videos featuring "depression, self-harm and suicide content" on its platform.
Lisa Dittmer, Amnesty International's researcher on children and young people's digital rights, explained that teen users who express interest in content related to mental health can be pulled into "toxic rabbit holes" that glorify self-harm.
"Within just three to four hours of engaging with TikTok’s ‘For You’ feed, teenage test accounts were exposed to videos that romanticized suicide or showed young people expressing intentions to end their lives, including information on suicide methods," she explained. "The testimonies of young people and bereaved parents in France reveal how TikTok normalized and exacerbated self-harm and suicidal ideation up to the point of recommending content on 'suicide challenges.'"
Amnesty's petition comes one week after the American Psychological Association (APA) published research that accumulated data collected in more than 70 other studies and found that excessive use of short-form video apps such as TikTok and Instagram "is associated with poorer cognitive and mental health in both youths and adults."
The research's findings were particularly troublesome concerning the impacts on young people's cognitive development, as they found that "repeated exposure to highly stimulating, fast-paced content may contribute to habituation, in which users become desensitized to slower, more effortful cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving, or deep learning."
The APA's study found that having the ability to swipe away from videos that don't offer instant gratification "could support a pattern of rapid disengagement from stimuli that do not provide immediate novelty or excitement," and thus "may diminish attentional control and reduce the capacity for sustained cognitive engagement, as cognitive processing becomes increasingly oriented toward brief, high-reward interactions rather than extended, goal-directed tasks."
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‘Who Wants to Live Like This?’ Locals Fume as Meta AI Data Center Upends Entire Community
Meta is financing the data center using accounting tricks that the Wall Street Journal reports appear "too good to be true."
Nov 24, 2025
The tiny town of Holly Ridge, Louisiana will soon be home to a massive $27 billion artificial intelligence data center being built by Facebook parent company Meta that, when finished, will be the largest in the world.
However, residents of Holly Ridge do not feel honored that they are at the epicenter of Meta's ambitious data center buildout, which they say has upended their entire community.
As reported by New Orleans-based public radio station WWNO last week, the nonstop parade of trucks driving through Holly Ridge has led to a 600% increase in vehicle crashes over the last year, including three truck crashes that occurred just outside Holly Ridge Elementary School.
Penelope Hull, a fourth-grade student at the school, told WWNO that the data center construction trucks are highly disruptive to learning even on days when they don't get into accidents, as they often cause the classroom walls to shake.
"You can't pay attention," she said. "And then you get off track and you lose what the teacher was telling you to do."
Hull also said that the school has had to shut down its playground out of concern that Meta construction trucks will crash into children playing during recess.
The threat of trucks crashing into schools isn't the only problem that the data center has brought. Local residents Joseph and Robin Williams told WWNO that they've noticed their tap water is frequently rust colored since Meta started building the data center, and they say their electricity frequently goes off for hours on end with no warning.
Similar issues were documented by progressive media outlet More Perfect Union, which sent its reporters down to Holly Ridge and found residents felt their concerns were being completely ignored by both Meta and their local elected officials.
"We had no voting on it, no community meetings, no nothing," one local woman told More Perfect Union. "It was done all under the table."
Another local resident told More Perfect Union that Holly Ridge has become "totally different" ever since Meta began AI data center construction.
"Who wants to live like this?" he asked as he looked on at more construction trucks barreling through the community.
Zuckerberg is building a data center in Louisiana the size of Manhattan — while Meta runs ads about how small towns love their data centers, we found furious locals who plan to leave town completely. pic.twitter.com/xHLG4KJMLO
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) November 19, 2025
According to a Monday report in the Wall Street Journal, the massive Meta Louisiana data center is being funded through debt that is being papered over with accounting gimmicks that the paper notes are likely "too good to be true."
Specifically, the Journal said that Meta has created a joint venture known as a variable interest entity with investment manager Blue Owl Capital, in which Meta will rent the data center for up to 20 years as a way to keep the debt from its construction off its books.
"This lease structure minimizes the lease liabilities and related assets Meta will recognize, and enables Meta to use 'operating lease,' rather than 'finance lease,' treatment," the Journal explained. "If Meta used the latter, it would look more like Meta owns the asset and is financing it with debt."
However, the report noted that Meta is relying on "some convenient assumptions" in justifying its use of this accounting tactic, some of which "appear implausible" and "are in tension with one another," which makes it hard to justify keeping debt from the data center off its books.
"Ultimately, the fact pattern Meta relies on to meet its conflicting objectives strains credibility," reports the Journal. "To believe Meta’s books, one must accept that Meta lacks the power to call the shots that matter most, that there’s reasonable doubt it will stay beyond four years, and that it probably won’t have to honor its guarantee—all at the same time."
Commenting on the Journal's story about the data center financing, Wired editor Tim Marchman described it in a post on Bluesky as "the equivalent of a 500-foot neon sign reading 'FRAUD.'"
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Executive Order Attacking State AI Laws 'Looks a Lot Like' Industry Dictating Trump's Policies
"Big Tech companies have spent the past year cozying up to Trump," said one critic, "and this is their reward. It’s a fabulous return on a very modest investment—at the expense of all Americans.”
Nov 20, 2025
The White House is rapidly expanding on its efforts to stop state legislatures from protecting their constituents by passing regulations on artificial intelligence technology, with the Trump administration reportedly preparing a draft executive order that would direct the US Department of Justice to target state-level laws in what one consumer advocate called a "blatant and disgusting circumvention of our democracy"—one entirely meant to do the bidding of tech giants.
The executive order would direct Attorney General Pam Bondi to create an AI Litigation Task Force to target laws that have already been passed in both red and blue states and to stop state legislators from passing dozens of bills that have been introduced, including ones to protect people from companion chatbots, require studies on the impact of AI on employment, and bar landlords from using AI algorithms to set rent prices.
The draft order takes aim at California's new AI safety laws, calling them "complex and burdensome" and claiming they are based on "purely speculative suspicion" that AI could harm users.
“States like Alabama, California, New York and many more have passed laws to protect kids from harms of Big Tech AI like chatbots and AI generated [child sexual abuse material]. Trump’s proposal to strip away these critical protections, which have no federal equivalent, threatens to create a taxpayer-funded death panel that will determine whether kids live or die when they decide what state laws will actually apply. This level of moral bankruptcy proves that Trump is just taking orders from Big Tech CEOs,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project.
The task force would operate on the administration's argument that the federal government alone is authorized to regulate commerce between states.
Shakeel Hashim, editor of the newsletter Transformer, pointed out that that claim has been pushed aggressively in recent months by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
President Donald Trump "and his team seem to have taken that idea and run with it," said Hashim. "It looks a lot like the tech industry dictating government policy—ironic, given that Trump rails against 'regulatory capture' in the draft order."
The DOJ panel would consult with Trump and White House AI Special Adviser David Sacks—an investor and cofounder of an AI company—on which state laws should be challenged.
The executive order would also authorize Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to publish a review of "onerous" state AI laws and restrict federal broadband funds to states found to have laws the White House disagrees with. It would further direct the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a new federal AI law that would preempt state laws.
The draft executive order was reported days after Trump called on House Republicans to include a ban on state-level AI regulations in the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act, which House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) indicated the party would try to do.
The multipronged effort to stop states from regulating the technology, including AI chatbots that have already been linked to the suicides of children, comes months after an amendment to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was resoundingly rejected in the Senate, 99-1.
Travis Hall, director for state engagement at the Center for Democracy and Technology, suggested that legal challenges would be filed swiftly if Trump moves forward with the executive order.
"The president cannot preempt state laws through an executive order, full stop," Hall told NBC News. "Preemption is a question for Congress, which they have considered and rejected, and should continue to reject."
David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, said harm the draft order could pose becomes clear "once you ask one simple question: What is an AI law?"
The draft doesn't specify, but Dayen posited that a range of statutes could apply: "Is that just something that has to do with [large language models]? Is it anything involving a business that uses an algorithm? Machine learning?"
"You can bet that every company will try to get it to apply to their industry, and do whatever corrupt transactions with Trump to ensure it," he continued. "So this is a roadmap to preempt the vast majority of state laws on business and commerce more generally, everything from consumer protection to worker rights, in the name of preventing 'obstruction' of AI. This should be challenged immediately upon signing."
The draft order was reported amid speculation among tech industry analysts that the AI "bubble" is likely about to burst, with investors dumping their shares in AI chip manufacturer Nvidia and an MIT report finding that 95% of generative AI pilot programs are not presenting a return on investment for companies. Executives at tech giant OpenAI recently suggested the government should provide companies with a "guarantee" for developing AI infrastrusture—which was widely interpreted as a plea for a bailout.
At Public Citizen, copresident Robert Weissman took aim at the White House for its claim that AI does not pose risks to consumers, noting AI technologies are already "undermining the emotional well-being of young people and adults and, in some cases, contributing to suicide; exacerbating racial disparities at workplaces; wrongfully denying patients healthcare; driving up electric bills and increasing greenhouse gas emissions; displacing jobs; and undermining society’s basic concept of truth."
Furthermore, he said, the president's draft order proves that "for all his posturing against Big Tech, Donald Trump is nothing but the industry’s well-paid waterboy."
"Big Tech companies have spent the past year cozying up to Trump—doing everything from paying for his garish White House ballroom to adopting content moderation policies of his liking—and this is their reward," said Weissman. "It’s a fabulous return on a very modest investment—at the expense of all Americans.”
JB Branch, the group's Big Tech accountability advocate, added that instead of respecting the Senate's bipartisan rejection of the earlier attempt to stop states from regulating AI, "industry lobbyists are now running to the White House."
"AI scams are exploding, children have died by suicide linked to harmful online systems, and psychologists are warning about AI-induced breakdowns, but President Trump is choosing to protect his tech oligarch friends over the safety of middle-class Americans," said Branch. "The administration should stop trying to shield Silicon Valley from responsibility and start listening to the overwhelming bipartisan consensus that stronger, not weaker, safeguards are needed.”
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