NYAG Claims TikTok Secretly Tests Teen Safety Features
New York Attorney General Letitia James has introduced additional allegations in a child safety lawsuit against TikTok Inc., claiming that the platform has conducted covert experiments on adolescent users. The new claims stem from a report, which references a confidential document from TikTok regarding an algorithmic test initiated in 2021. This test affected approximately 15 million users in the United States, including a teenager who tragically died by suicide. In the context of the experiment, TikTok deliberately withheld a new safety feature from 10% of its US user base to assess the impact of this modification on user engagement time on the platform.
“As a result, TikTok has subjected users whom TikTok included in such A/B tests to an experience that TikTok has made less safe by design,” James said in the amended lawsuit, which includes details of the experiment that were previously sealed from public view. The teen who died by suicide was in the test group that didn’t get the safety features TikTok rolled out. In a court filing, TikTok confirmed that it runs tests on its platform that “may involve a portion of platform traffic that continued to receive the original experience.” However, the company denied that those tests make the platform less safe for those users. “We continuously make improvements to our platform which means that, like most companies, we regularly test new products and features to validate the experience and understand how they work in the real world,” the company said in a statement.
New York is among over a dozen states that have initiated legal action against the social media company, asserting that its platform poses risks to the mental health of younger users and alleging that the company’s leadership has misrepresented the safety of TikTok to the public. In September, TikTok consented to a payment of up to $300 million to settle a comparable case in Alabama; however, additional lawsuits initiated by individual states remain unresolved. TikTok is under increasing pressure to address these cases following Meta Platforms Inc.’s settlement agreement with nearly every state in the nation concerning youth safety issues. Meta has consented to implement modifications to the operational frameworks of its platforms, alongside a financial commitment of up to $18 billion.
However, the settlement featured an atypical clause: a $5.3 billion segment of Meta’s disbursement over the forthcoming decade is contingent upon TikTok and Snap Inc. implementing analogous platform modifications and consenting to make equivalent contributions to state initiatives aimed at assisting children. Meta, TikTok, Snap, and Google’s YouTube are currently confronted with a multitude of lawsuits stemming from analogous allegations brought forth by state attorneys general, individual users, and school districts. The majority of those cases have been aggregated into multidistrict proceedings. Other cases, including the one initiated by New York, are undergoing separate trials.
