A Suit Two Years in the Making
In October 2024, then-North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein sued TikTok and parent company ByteDance, joined by a coalition of thirteen state attorneys general, alleging the platform was deliberately engineered to be addictive to minors through infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendations, and constant notifications, while TikTok falsely represented the app as safe for young users (NCDOJ complaint announcement). The complaint cites internal data suggesting the average teen user spends nearly two hours a day on the app, with roughly a quarter of teens logging three or more hours daily. Stein has since become governor; current Attorney General Jeff Jackson, in office since January 1, 2025, is now defending the suit.
TikTok moved to dismiss on jurisdictional, Section 230, and First Amendment grounds. On August 19, 2025, Wake County Superior Court Judge Adam Conrad — sitting on North Carolina's specialized Business Court — denied the motion in a 29-page order, finding that "ByteDance advertises widely in North Carolina, makes TikTok available here, and fosters ongoing relationships with its app's users," which together amount to "the active, purposeful exploitation of a market in North Carolina" (North Carolina Business Court ruling summary). That phrase — market exploitation — is now the crux of the appeal.
The Jurisdictional Fight at the Supreme Court
TikTok appealed the jurisdictional ruling to the North Carolina Supreme Court, and in its May 2026 brief, the company argued the state's theory "would expose every North Carolina business and resident with an online presence to lawsuits anywhere in the country." TikTok wrote that under the state's logic, "if a company or person makes a good or service available online or speaks to the general public, it can be sued everywhere," and pointed to the risk facing ordinary in-state businesses: a hypothetical "Durham software company that sells to businesses nationwide" could, by the same reasoning, be "haled into the courts of any state" (TikTok brief coverage). The company's core due-process argument is that specific jurisdiction requires purposeful targeting of a particular forum — not mere accessibility of a nationwide app, however interactive.
Steelmanning the State's Position
North Carolina's underlying concern is legitimate and shouldn't be dismissed as opportunistic forum-shopping. States have a well-established police-power interest in protecting minors within their borders from deceptive marketing and harmful product design, regardless of where a company's engineers sit. If TikTok's recommendation systems and interface choices genuinely functioned as alleged — maximizing compulsive use among children while the company assured parents and regulators the app was safe — that is squarely the kind of conduct consumer-protection law exists to reach. Judge Conrad's broader merits ruling was blunt on this point: "Federal law does not immunize this conduct, the First Amendment does not bless it, and North Carolina's laws and courts are not powerless to address it." A state whose residents are allegedly harmed by a nationally distributed product has a real stake in adjudicating that harm at home, not in Delaware or California where the company happens to be organized.
Why the Theory Still Goes Too Far
The problem is the mechanism, not the motive. "Market exploitation," as Judge Conrad defined it — advertising in a state, making an app available there, and maintaining ongoing user relationships — describes essentially every consumer internet product with a national footprint. Streaming services, e-commerce platforms, SaaS tools, and social apps all advertise broadly, operate nationwide, and maintain continuing user relationships through logins and data collection. If that combination alone satisfies the purposeful-availment test that International Shoe and its progeny require for specific jurisdiction, the limiting principle effectively disappears: any interactive business becomes suable in all fifty states over conduct it never specifically directed anywhere. That is precisely the unpredictability due-process jurisdictional doctrine was built to prevent, and it falls hardest on smaller companies without TikTok's litigation budget — including, as TikTok noted, North Carolina's own exporters.
The Section 230 Shadow Over the Case
The jurisdictional appeal doesn't resolve the merits, but it determines whether they get reached in North Carolina at all. Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act shields platforms from liability for treating them "as the publisher or speaker" of third-party content (47 U.S.C. § 230). North Carolina's theory — like similar suits nationally — sidesteps that shield by framing the claims as product-design defects (infinite scroll, autoplay, notification cadence) rather than claims about specific pieces of content. Judge Conrad's order already accepted that framing at the trial level. If the Supreme Court affirms jurisdiction, North Carolina becomes one more venue testing whether "addictive design" recharacterization can route around Section 230 entirely — a question courts nationally are still splitting on, and one Congress, not fifty separate state courts applying fifty versions of "market exploitation," is better positioned to settle (TikTok's dismissal push).
The better path is proportionate: let North Carolina's design-defect and deception claims proceed if they can establish jurisdiction under settled, narrow purposeful-availment standards — not a new elastic 'exploitation' test that swallows the rule.