TikTok employees repeatedly raised concerns internally about the risks the short-form video app posed to children, including sexual exploitation and exposure to suicide content.Previously unreported court records show that the employees were frustrated with how the company's leadership responded to their concerns.Depositions of staffers filed in federal court in March 2026 offer new insights into how TikTok has approached child safety since the platform exploded in popularity among young users in 2018.Employees raised the alarm about minors appearing in sexual content on the app, which viewers could pay to access and the company would profit from — a potential financial crime.
They also flagged that users under 18 were using loopholes to bypass age-restricted content and to block parents and guardians from reviewing their activity on the app.TikTok also refrained from conducting surveys to assess the ages of its users because it was concerned that it would have to turn the results over to the Federal Trade Commission, the documents show.NPR repeatedly sought comment from TikTok about the issues raised in the court documents.
After extended communications, the company declined to provide a statement for this story.It did, however, direct NPR to various company policies that it had previously published on its website.TikTok, alongside Meta, Google and Snap, is a defendant in multi-district litigation initiated in 2022 to coordinate hundreds of lawsuits alleging that the social media platforms are designed to be harmful to users under 18, and that the companies knew their products carried risks that they did not disclose.TikTok has settled several cases in the multi-district litigation before they reached trial, including a landmark trial in Los Angeles earlier this year, in which a jury found that co-defendants YouTube and Meta designed their platforms to be addictive to young users.
In May, TikTok agreed to pay $8 million to settle a youth mental health and addi...