Minnesota sued TikTok for harming youth. Here are the numbers on mental health and social media.

Attorney General Keith Ellison announced Tuesday he’s suing TikTok for illegally exploiting young users. The lawsuit resembles a similar suit filed by more than a dozen bipartisan attorneys general last year. They allege that TikTok’s addictive algorithm, which delivers personalized content in a never-ending scroll of short videos, along with other features such as TikTok LIVE and “beauty filters,” are harming young users’ mental health in what amounts to a deceitful trade practice.

The lawsuit cites data on TikTok usage among Minnesotan youth specifically, though the numbers are redacted because TikTok says they are confidential, according to the attorney general’s office.

We know that TikTok usage is widespread among teens nationwide, suggesting similar trends in Minnesota. Apart from YouTube, TikTok is the most popular social media app among teens. A 2024 survey by Pew Research found that 63% of U.S. teenagers use TikTok, down from 67% in 2022, with 16% — one out of every six American teenagers — who say they use TikTok “almost constantly.”

And, TikTok’s own data show that teens check the app “an average of 17 times a day and spend an average of almost two hours a day on the app, more than any other age group,” according to the lawsuit.

Many teens say they use social media too much — 27%, according to a survey conducted in 2023 by Pew.

As kids say they are glued to their phones, their mental health appears to be worsening, both here and nationwide.

Minnesota’s statewide student survey reports that nearly one-third of 11th graders in 2022 said they had long-term mental health problems, compared to 27% in 2019. For ninth graders, the percentages were 28% in 2022, up from 23% in 2019.

Though many mental health questions in the survey change, students across time are asked about how often they build friendships. The results show an increasing percentage of kids without close friends. The percentage of 11th graders who say that they build friendships with other people “not at all or rarely” jumped from 3.8% in 2013 to 7% in 2022.

More teens think that smartphones make it more difficult to learn good social skills, according to the 2023 Pew survey.

It’s not just kids who are worried about their social media use. Of 1,400 mental health workers surveyed by Politico, over a quarter believe that social media is the biggest driver of mental health issues in kids, though clinicians cite a variety of other factors, such as political instability and social isolation.

What remains uncertain — at the moment — is a causal link between social media use and mental health problems.

For example, Candice L. Odgers, a University of California-Irvine psychologist, wrote in Nature last year that the “suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.”

Ellison explicitly compares TikTok to nicotine. The comparison unwittingly underscores just how much patience Minnesotans may need to hold the social media giants accountable if indeed they are selling a dangerous product.

The U.S. Surgeon General offered the first warning about tobacco use in 1964.

Nearly 35 years passed before Minnesota won its major jury trial against Big Tobacco in 1998.