Employees warned TikTok about child exploitation, court documents show

The company is facing hundreds of lawsuits over its record on safety.

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Court documents are shedding new light on reported child safety issues at TikTok. According to depositions detailed by NPR, multiple employees repeatedly flagged serious flaws in the company's handling of child safety, including child exploitation, but were "frustrated" with TikTok's response.

The records are drawn from ongoing lawsuits the company is facing related to its handling of child safety. TikTok is the target of hundreds of such lawsuits, though it has settled some cases, including those making claims the app was designed to be pe addictive.

According to statements made by company employees, TikTok executives were notified that teens were regularly appearing in live streams in the app, which raised concerns about potential grooming and exploitation. After Forbes published an article in 2022 about teens stripping in TikTok Live videos in which viewers could pay for in-app "gifts," a safety employee said the company knew about such content. Employees also warned that the company was making "significant revenue" from live video content involving children even though TikTok's rules barred minors from appearing in them.

Other employees also flagged shortcomings in the company's parental controls and age-based safety features. For example, a "loophole" allowed minors to bypass TikTok's age checks if they signed up for with a Facebook, Instagram or Google account. The app also contained a "hidden link" that allowed teens to remove themselves from TikTok's "family pairing" feature.

TikTok didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The company didn't provide an on the record statement to NPR.

NPR further cites a report written by Eric Han, TikTok's former head of safety, about the risks posed by algorithmic "rabbit holes" in which the app repeatedly recommends harmful content, like posts related to suicide. The report, which seemingly dates back to 2020, said that there was a "real contagion effect" with such content.

TikTok has recently come under scrutiny for how it's handled repeated recommendations of problematic content. The company introduced a feature in 2021 that was meant to help people avoid "repetitive patterns" of certain types of content. But the company, in an apparent test, held back the feature from millions of users. A teen who was part of that experiment died by suicide after seeing repeated content about self harm, according to documents that have surfaced in a lawsuit brought by New York's attorney general.