A day after President Trump praised the social media platform from the Oval Office, the state Supreme Court on Thursday denied TikTok’s request for the high court to end a lawsuit against them brought by Attorney General Tim Griffin.
Because TikTok has the right to appeal if they were to lose the lawsuit at trial, the Supreme Court said, there was no basis to grant the “extraordinary” relief requested.
Griffin filed the lawsuit against TikTok Inc.; TikTok Pte Ltd.; ByteDance Inc.; and ByteDance Ltd. in Cleburne County Circuit Court in March 2023. TikTok, Inc. is a California-based company that operates the TikTok application, while TikTok Pte Ltd. is a Singapore-based entity that is listed as owner or operator of the app on various app stores. ByteDance, Inc., is a Delaware corporation, and ByteDance Ltd. is a multinational corporation, headquartered in China, and it is the parent company of the other three entities. (For clarity, we will refer to the defendants collectively as “TikTok” in this story.)
According to Griffin, TikTok violated Arkansas’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act in a number of ways, primarily by claiming that “alcohol, tobacco and drug use and references,” “sexual content and nudity,” “mature/suggestive themes” and “profanity or crude humor” are “infrequent/mild” on the app, which resulted in the app stores advertising TikTok as being appropriate for people 12 and older. The complaint claims that these topics are not infrequent or mild on the app, but common. Griffin contends that TikTok “encourages” users to search for these topics because it does not hide that content when someone searches for it using slang or intentionally misspelled words (such as “shromz” instead of “shrooms” when searching for content about hallucinogenic mushrooms).
Griffin crowed in his usual fashion about a “big win” in May 2024 after TikTok’s motion to dismiss was denied by the circuit court. Because they could not appeal from that order, TikTok filed a petition for writ of certiorari in the state Supreme Court, as well as a motion to stay the proceedings in the circuit court until the certiorari petition was ruled upon. A writ of certiorari is an order directing a lower court to deliver its record in a case to the Supreme Court so the higher court may review a decision the lower court made. It is considered an “extraordinary writ” and is generally only allowed when a party has no other avenue for relief in the courts.
The case had been on hold in Cleburne County since September, after the Supreme Court granted the motion to stay while they considered the motion for certiorari. TikTok argued that the lower court lacked personal jurisdiction over the defendants because the state failed to allege that the defendants purposefully directed their business to Arkansas and the state’s causes of action against TikTok do not arise from specific actions TikTok took within the state. (Personal jurisdiction refers to a court’s power over the parties to a lawsuit, and it is distinct from subject-matter jurisdiction, which is a court’s ability to hear certain types of cases.)
Thursday’s unanimous opinion explained why the court ultimately denied the motion:
Petitioners assert that an extraordinary writ is the only avenue to challenge the circuit court’s erroneous jurisdictional finding before they are forced to expend substantial resources defending claims in an improper forum. This assertion does not give rise to the issuance of a writ. Matters of personal jurisdiction are not proper subjects for an extraordinary writ.
Rather, the court said, TikTok “may raise issues of jurisdiction in an appeal” and that, because TikTok has “another adequate remedy,” there is no basis to issue a writ of certiorari.
Assuming no further action is taken in the Supreme Court, the case will return to Cleburne County for further proceedings.
Much like her former boss’s on-again, off-again relationship with the app, TikTok has been something of a political ping-pong ball for Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
In January of 2023, on her first official day as governor, one of Sanders’ first orders was to ban the app from all state-owned computers and phones due to ByteDance’s “significant ties to the Chinese Communist Party.” Within a few weeks of that executive order, University of Arkansas System officials had banned the app from all university owned devices. And when Griffin announced the lawsuit against TikTok in March of last year, Sanders got top billing on the attorney general’s press release.
Not that everything about TikTok bothers Sanders, however. In May, a group opposing a proposed constitutional amendment on education accepted a $250,000 donation from Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire who is one of the leading investors in ByteDance. That opposition group was headed by Sanders’ once and future campaign manager, Chris Caldwell, and included John Schmelze, a real estate developer who Sanders appointed to the Arkansas Economic Development Commission.
