BOSTON (SHNS) - TikTok intentionally designed its social media platform to "override a young person's agency" and keep them tied to the app, Attorney General Andrea Campbell alleged in a new lawsuit. Campbell filed the lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court on Tuesday alongside attorneys general from 12 states and the District of Columbia who alleged the company has played a role in the youth mental health crisis. TikTok said many of the claims against it are "inaccurate and misleading." The suit claims the company's conduct violates state consumer protection laws and generates billions of dollars of advertising revenue through "deploying self-described 'coercive' design features on its platform that are specifically designed to take advantage of the psychological and emotional vulnerability of young users to induce them to spend as much time on its platform as possible—longer than they would otherwise choose—and in a manner that causes them harm." The goal, the AG's office said, is "to bar TikTok from continuing to engage in unfair and deceptive practices that harm young people." Campbell told reporters on Tuesday, however, that she is not seeking a ban of the social media platform. "We're seeking not only for an acknowledgement of the harm they're causing, but also injunctive relief, and that may include, of course, changing features, the design features," Campbell said. One of those design features she highlighted as intentionally keeping young people on the app for as long as possible, regardless of potential harms, was the so-called infinite scroll. This allows users to scroll endlessly on the app without ever running out of content to view, or seeing the same thing more than once, which creates a steady and constant dopamine rush to your brain as it consumes new and short media, according to studies. Studies also show that this could be leading to a shortening of young people — and adults' — attention spans. Excessive social media use can also lead to negative impacts on young people's brain development, sleeping habits, and stop them from participating in enriching activities outside of their phones, Campbell said. Campbell also talked about the so-called "beauty filter." This is a widely-used in-app tool that changes a user's appearance, smoothing their skin, narrowing their nose and otherwise "enhancing" their physical features in a way that their viewers may not realize they don't look entirely like themselves. "This is particularly harmful to the platform's users, especially young girls, as we allege in our complaint, TikTok knew this too," she said. "Records show that the company knew these filters caused harm to young people, but deliberately chose to keep them because they knew their removal would decrease a user's time on the platform. This case is not about regulating the content that is shown to TikTok users. It's about TikTok's own bad conduct, its intentional design choices that trap young people's time and attention and hurt them in the process." The complaint alleges youth addiction to TikTok has been tied to suicide, self-harm, sleep disorders, eating disorders, body image issues, anxiety and depression. "We strongly disagree with these claims, many of which we believe to be inaccurate and misleading," said TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said. "We're proud of and remain deeply committed to the work we've done to protect teens and we will continue to update and improve our product. We provide robust safeguards, proactively remove suspected underage users, and have voluntarily launched safety features such as default screentime limits, family pairing, and privacy by default for minors under 16. We've endeavored to work with the Attorneys General for over two years, and it is incredibly disappointing they have taken this step rather than work with us on constructive solutions to industrywide challenges."  Campbell acknowledged that there are also benefits to social media platforms, however. "For those in our LGBTQ+ community, it creates a space and a place for young people to interact," she said, when asked by a reporter about the platform being popular among both young people and their parents. Her office said Campbell has never personally downloaded the app, but is familiar with the platform. The attorney general said TikTok "lulled parents into believing" that it had safety features that would protect teen users. It advertised a daily screen time limit of 60 minutes, she said, however this is just a pop-up prompt that is quickly bypassed by scrolling away. Instead, the complaint says, teens spend "hours upon hours, every single day," on TikTok. "In China, meanwhile, TikTok's sister platform has much stricter safety restrictions, including limiting some minors to 40 minutes, that's 40 minutes of use per day, and limiting the platform's availability to certain hours," Campbell said. Last month, Instagram unveiled an overhaul of its policies around minors using its social media app. The app, owned by Facebook company Meta, said the accounts of users younger than 18 would be made private by default — so only approved followers could see what they post. They also plan to stop notifications to minors between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. to promote sleep, and introduce more supervision tools for adults, including a feature that allows parents to see the accounts their teenager recently messaged, the New York Times reported. It was around this time last year that Campbell announced she was suing Instagram, Facebook and parent company Meta Platforms for many of the same reasons she filed the suit against TikTok on Tuesday. "Meta has preyed on an entire generation of young people for profit. On its Instagram platform, Meta secretly deployed design features and mechanisms that deliberately exploited young peoples' still-developing brains and adolescent vulnerabilities. They did so in order to override the young person's ability to self-regulate their use," Campbell said last October. Asked about the state of that lawsuit on Tuesday, Campbell said she couldn't speak about it in detail because the complaint is ongoing. As the conversation around what to do about social media evolves, Campbell said she is focused on "all the tools that are available to us," but also thinking about "what legislation could we possibly file at the State House to help us in these efforts?" Gov. Maura Healey said earlier this year that she is also open to "whatever policy changes make sense in the space." "Social media, we know, has demonstrable harm for our young people -- the addictive nature of it, the mental health issues that it creates, it's documented now, it's well known -- and we need to take action. Whether legislation is the appropriate course, I'm not sure," Healey said on GBH Radio in March, when asked about whether she would back a move like the one that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law creating a minimum age requirement for social media. The Florida law requires social media platforms to terminate all accounts belonging to people younger than 14 and accounts belonging to people aged 14 or 15 who do not have parental consent. "I see the talk about banning TikTok and the like," Healey said in March, "I just really would hope and encourage that just culturally, as a society, that we could back up parents, that we could back up our young people who actually if you talk to many of them, they don't want to be so tied to their phones, but they feel like if they're not tied to their phones, they're missing out. Everyone else is doing it. And no kid wants to feel that way. But this stuff is bad."