Court documents and internal depositions reveal TikTok employees repeatedly warned management about child safety risks, age verification loopholes, and algorithmic content exposure affecting minors.
The disclosed records shed light on internal safety reports and platform governance as TikTok faces hundreds of related lawsuits.
According to documents and depositions uncovered by NPR, executives were told that teenagers were frequently appearing on live streams, raising concerns about child exploitation. After a 2022 Forbes report revealed that teenagers were appearing semi-nude in live videos with paid digital gifts, a security employee said the company was aware of the situation. Employees warned that TikTok was making significant revenue from live streams with children, even though its rules prohibit minors from participating.
Control gaps and technical obstacles
The documents reveal that there was a way to bypass age controls, as minors could sign up using accounts from other well-known platforms. At the same time, there was a hidden link that allowed teens to remove the restrictions their parents had put in place on their own.
Around 2020, TikTok's then-chief security officer, Eric Han, wrote an internal report on the dangers of algorithms leading users to repeatedly view harmful content.
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The New York lawsuit
In a separate case, the New York attorney general filed a lawsuit accusing TikTok of hiding a safety feature from millions of users in a secret test. According to documents in that case, a teenager who participated in the experiment ended his life after seeing repeated self-harm content.
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