Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed a motion to compel the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok to comply with an earlier court order requiring it to produce relevant evidence in response to a multi-state investigation.
In March, 46 attorneys general joined Skrmetti in requesting that a state court force TikTok to comply with the investigation into the platform’s impact on children.
Specifically, the group of attorneys general are investigating whether or not the Chinese company “engaged in deceptive, unfair, and unconscionable conduct that harmed the mental health of TikTok users, particularly children and teens.”
On Friday, Skrmetti filed a new motion asking the Tennessee state court to compel TikTok to comply with the terms of an Agreed Order dated April 17 requiring the company to produce “documents and a witness to answer questions under oath about TikTok’s potential destruction of relevant evidence during the course of this investigation.”
TikTok, according to Skrmetti’s office, failed to comply with the Agreed Order by “not providing a knowledgeable witness who could testify about the events leading up to TikTok’s destruction of potentially relevant evidence, the extent of the deletion of relevant evidence, including communications TikTok employees had internally, and whether the deleted material can be restored.”
The Chinese company has also failed to produce “full and complete copies of relevant documents,” Skrmetti’s office notes.
“Whether TikTok wants to comply with our investigative demands or not, we will continue to use every legal tool available to uncover the truth and protect Tennessee kids,” Skrmetti said in a statement. “The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office remains committed to a thorough investigation of the social media industry and its effect on teen mental health. If that investigation reveals misconduct, we will work relentlessly to hold wrongdoers accountable.”
Skrmetti previously told The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy that TikTok is an “extreme outlier” in his experience in terms of producing information relevant to an investigation.
“When you have all the attorneys general working together as you have here, which is a pretty rare occurrence, that’s a serious signal to a corporation, that they’re under significant scrutiny and that this is a serious investigation,” Skrmetti said at the time. “And every other time that I’ve seen this, even where companies fought tooth and nail and disagreed vigorously with every theory we had about why they were liable, they still produced what they needed to produce, and they still preserved what they needed to preserve.”
“TikTok is an extreme outlier in my experience, and that’s why we went to the court. Ordinarily, you can resolve these with some conversations, and everybody understands that at the end of the day, they’re going to have to produce what they have to produce, and they grudgingly go along with it,” Skrmetti added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
