A Texas Judge Found TikTok Lied About 'Restricted Mode.' Videos It Called 'Do Not Allow' Were Filed as 'Hard to Find.'

A state judge in Austin ruled Thursday that TikTok violated Texas consumer protection law by misleading users about how it screened content for minors, finding that the platform's much-advertised "Restricted Mode" did not work as promised and that videos the company publicly said it would remove were instead quietly kept online under an internal label of "hard to find."

The ruling by Travis County District Judge Cory Liu grew out of a lawsuit Attorney General Ken Paxton filed on January 9, 2025, accusing TikTok of deceptively marketing its app as safe for children. According to the decision, TikTok told users that material violating its Community Guidelines, including depictions of drugs, nudity, alcohol, injuries and profanity, would be taken down. Internally, the state showed, some of that content was classified not as "do not allow" but as "hard to find," a category that let it stay on the platform and remain reachable by minors. Liu agreed the practice violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

The judge also found that Texas had established that Restricted Mode, the setting TikTok promotes to parents as a filter for mature content, "exposed minors to content the company said would be filtered out."

"TikTok sacrificed the safety and innocence of children for engagement and numbers, and now they are being held accountable," Paxton said in a statement. "Texas is now the first state in the nation to hold TikTok liable for lying to parents about the safety of its platform and exposing children to harmful content." He added: "I will continue to go after TikTok and every social media company that exposes children to predators, inappropriate content, addictive features, or any other dangerous aspect of their platforms."

Thursday's decision resolves liability only. The case now moves to a trial, which Paxton's office expects to be set for October, where a court will determine what relief and civil penalties TikTok must pay. The Texas act allows penalties per violation, and the state has not said how many violations it will argue for. TikTok did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters or KPRC. The company says its app is intended for users 13 and older and that certain features are restricted until 16 or 18.

The ruling arrives in a crowded field of litigation over children and social media. Paxton has a separate pending suit against TikTok under Texas's SCOPE Act, which governs how platforms handle minors' data and parental controls. In August, TikTok settled three lawsuits brought by young users who alleged its design was addictive, and Meta agreed the same month to pay as much as $17 billion to resolve similar claims by 51 state attorneys general. A federal appeals court in August also cleared roughly 3,000 addiction suits against Meta, TikTok and YouTube to proceed.

What sets the Texas case apart is the theory. Rather than arguing the app is harmful by design, the state argued, and the judge accepted, that TikTok made specific factual representations to parents about what its filters would do and that those representations were false. That is a consumer-fraud claim, not a product-liability one, and it sidesteps the First Amendment defenses that have derailed some state attempts to regulate platforms directly. Other state attorneys general are expected to study the decision closely.