Court documents show employees warned TikTok about child exploitation
Court records from ongoing lawsuits indicate that several TikTok employees repeatedly raised serious child safety flaws, including exploitation risks. They were reportedly frustrated by the company's response.
Employees at the social media company TikTok repeatedly warned management about serious shortcomings in child safety, including child exploitation, but were left frustrated by how the company responded. That is according to deposition testimony from court cases, detailed by US public radio organization NPR. TikTok currently faces hundreds of lawsuits over child safety. It has settled some of them, including cases alleging the app was designed to be addictive.
Live streams and exploitation risks
Employees stated that TikTok executives were told teenagers regularly appeared in live streams, raising concerns about possible grooming and exploitation. In 2022, Forbes published an article about teens stripping in TikTok Live videos, where viewers could pay for in-app "gifts". A safety employee said the company was aware of such content. Staff also warned that TikTok earned "significant revenue" from live video involving children, even though its rules barred minors from appearing in them.
Gaps in parental controls
Other employees pointed to weaknesses in parental controls and age-based safety features. One "loophole" let minors bypass age checks if they signed up with a Facebook, Instagram or Google account. The app also had a "hidden link" that allowed teens to remove themselves from "family pairing", the feature that links parent and child accounts.
Algorithmic risks
NPR also cites a report by Eric Han, TikTok's former head of safety, which appears to date from 2020. It described the dangers of algorithmic "rabbit holes", where the app repeatedly recommends harmful content such as posts about suicide, and said such content had a "real contagion effect". In 2021 the company introduced a feature meant to help users avoid "repetitive patterns" of certain content types, but in an apparent test it withheld the feature from millions of users. According to documents that surfaced in a lawsuit brought by New York's attorney general, a teen in that experiment died by suicide after seeing repeated self-harm content.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment and did not provide an on-the-record statement to NPR.
