seven French families announce they are taking TikTok to court

TikTok will have to explain itself to French justice. Monday, November 4, seven families announced, through their lawyer Laure Boutron-Marmion, that they were taking the Chinese social network to court in Créteil. These families “all denounce the same thing, the deterioration of the physical and mental health of their children”explained the latter on Franceinfo.

According to the plaintiffs, TikTok promoted, through its personalized content recommendation algorithm, numerous videos encouraging eating disorders, self-harm and suicide, particularly among its youngest users. To do this, they rely on the trajectories of seven French adolescents familiar with the platform and victims of psychopathological disorders, such as anorexia.

Aged 15, two of them ended their lives. Marie's death in 2021 caused her family to file a first complaint in September 2023 against TikTok for “provocation to suicide”. A criminal specialist specializing in the defense of minors, lawyer Laure Boutron-Marmion also represents the family in this separate criminal procedure.

TikTok's algorithm called into question

Since then, the lawyer founded a collective in 2024 called Algos Victima, which brings together families from “victims of social networks” and has “for the ambition of empowering social media companies”. As part of TikTok's legal action, the collective denounces the potential “addictive” of the ByteDance app as well as its lack of moderation of content related to suicide, self-harm and eating disorders.

Particularly pointed out is the algorithm of the Chinese social network which, on the basis of interactions with a certain type of content, generates similar recommendations through the “For you” thread which could prove harmful. “I had started to hurt myself, to scar myself and I liked content that talked about sad songstestifies to Franceinfo one of the seven teenagers involved in the procedure. Then came content inciting self-harm, suicide or things like that…”

Contacted by The Worldthe Créteil judicial court did not wish to communicate. TikTok, for its part, has not publicly expressed itself on the subject of this legal summons in France, and had not responded to requests from the Monde at the time of publication of this article.

Last September, TikTok participated, with the companies Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) and Snap (owner of Snapchat), in the creation of a program aimed at stemming the proliferation of content encouraging self-harm and suicide . Called Thrive, the latter should allow its member companies to report content of this type to each other.