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 initially 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.
After publication, TikTok spokesperson Nathaniel Brown sent a statement saying the citations and claims in the story are "clearly cherry-picked at the behest of trial lawyers and used to inaccurately rewrite our history and mislead the public about our commitment to youth safety and how our platform works."
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 addiction lawsuit brought by a school district in rural Kentucky. In a separate lawsuit, TikTok agreed to a $100 million settlement with the state of Alabama in September over allegations it designed its platform to be addictive to minors and exposed them to harmful content.
Because the cases against TikTok have yet to be heard before a jury, the previously unreported employee depositions reviewed by NPR have not been submitted as evidence at trial. In 2024, NPR reported on improperly redacted documents from another legal case that revealed that company employees sought to maximize teenagers' use of the app even while it publicly backed screentime limits for younger users.
"Fighting about fixing this for months"
In one deposition, Reagen Maher, who held senior roles in safety and investigations at TikTok between 2021 and 2024, described going on a "crusade" for several months trying to elevate safety issues with some of TikTok's highest executives. Maher testified that her findings had been escalated to V Pappas, TikTok's chief operating officer at the time.
In an excerpt from a log of an internal chat Maher had with a colleague, which was read out in her testimony, she wrote: "I have been fighting about fixing this for months with people who didn't think the harms are severe enough."
Maher said she was concerned about the prevalence of "transactional sexual content and any viewers," including children and teenagers appearing in the content and watching it.
In her deposition, Maher answered questions about a 2022 article in Forbes reporting that minors had been stripping on TikTok's Live feature, sometimes in exchange for digital currency known as a "gift," which can be converted into money via a payment platform or bank transfer.
Maher stated the company was aware of the sexual exploitation of minors on the platform before the Forbes article was published.
"Put simply, senior leaders know about this issue. There are some ongoing projects to fix parts of it, and frankly, I'm hoping [that] this article puts a fire behind other potential solutions," Maher wrote in an internal chat at the time a colleague.
In 2021, TikTok introduced age-based account settings that restrict some features for 13 to 17-year-olds, including limits on sending and receiving direct messages and broadcasting in real time on TikTok Live.
An internal investigation found children between the ages of 13 and 15 appeared in 112,000 TikTok Live videos in January 2022 alone, according to employees' testimony in the March court filings.
The report identified risks including adult predators grooming children and the creation of child sexual abuse material. It also found that TikTok received "significant revenue" from gifts sent to livestreams that violated the platform's rules.
Federal law in the U.S. can impose criminal liability on a company for knowingly benefiting from participation in a child sex trafficking venture, said Silvija Krupena, director of the Financial Intelligence Unit at RedCompass Labs, a consultancy based in the U.K.
"If an adult pays a child, through virtual gifts, for sexual acts on a livestream, that is payment for the sexual exploitation of a child. The gift is the payment," said Krupena. "Strip out the language of gifts, coins and diamonds, and the allegation is clear then. An adult paid. A child was exploited. The platform took a cut."
Platforms must report apparent child sexual abuse material, child sex trafficking and online enticement to the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) when they obtain actual knowledge of facts indicating offenses covered by the reporting law.
Money generated through child exploitation offences can be criminal proceeds. Knowingly processing those funds can amount to money laundering.
If the gifting system qualifies as regulated money transmission, anti-money laundering obligations may follow. Knowledge matters a great deal, particularly when assessing potential criminal liability, which is why warnings to executives matter, said Krupena.
In an ongoing lawsuit filed in 2024, Utah's attorney general alleged that TikTok's Live feature exposed minors to sexual exploitation by adults, while TikTok profited from the transactions.
TikTok said it has an anti-money laundering program in line with international standards and the industry's best practices.
The company did not respond to requests for comment on whether it reported all of the TikTok Live videos containing child sexual abuse material to NCMEC, as required by federal law. The company also did not respond to questions about whether it had shut down the accounts it identified paying for child sexual abuse content.
The company did not respond to NPR's questions about its anti-money laundering protocols, including whether it filed suspicious activity reports to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network related to the revenues it received from TikTok Live videos containing illegal material. TikTok also did not answer questions about how it handled revenue it identified as coming from child sexual abuse material, including whether it forfeited those funds or retained them as profit.
Loopholes to bypass age-restricted content
Other employee testimony highlighted TikTok's difficulties in preventing users under 18 from accessing adult-only features and harmful content.
To determine the age of its users, TikTok requires users to enter their date of birth when signing up for the platform. In most countries, 13 is the minimum age for an account. The company says it also analyzes data associated with an account to identify those where the stated age may be incorrect. In these cases, accounts can be sent for human review and potentially placed in a different age-appropriate experience.
Yet, according to Maher's testimony, a loophole existed in which children could access an 18-plus version of TikTok if they signed up via Google, Facebook or Instagram. Maher said senior leadership was aware of this, though the company did not respond to NPR's questions about the loophole.
TikTok has grown to become one of the most widely used social media apps globally, with 68% of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 reporting using the platform in 2025, according to the Pew Research Center.
The app first became prominent in 2018, when ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, acquired Musical.ly, a platform for creating short music and lip-syncing videos that was popular with teen users in the U.S. Musical.ly was combined with TikTok, triggering rapid growth in the app's international user base. (As of January 22, 2026, TikTok's U.S. operations are majority-owned by American investors, following a deal that reduced ByteDance's control over the platform.)
Soon after the 2018 merger with Musical.ly, the company was keen to determine the demographics of its user base in the U.S. But the court documents show that it held off on researching the question in an effort to avoid government scrutiny over having children under the age of 13 on the platform.
In testimony concerning a 2018 discussion between Adam Wang, who was the Head of TikTok Live at the time, and Alex Zhu, co-founder of Musical.ly and then president of TikTok following the acquisition of Musical.ly, the two discussed a survey. They noted that "Having elementary school [as an answer in the survey] is definitely violating COPPA [the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act]," Wang confirmed in his testimony. Because of this, the survey avoided questions that could point to users' ages, such as what phase of schooling users were enrolled in.
COPPA is a federal law that protects the online privacy and personal information of children under 13. It generally prohibits companies from collecting children's personal information without verifiable parental consent.
"If the FTC knows about this survey, they might want us to submit the results, and I am not sure if it's [a] good result," Wang said in an internal chat.
TikTok introduced "family pairing" features in 2020, which allow parents and guardians to manage aspects of their children's use of the platform, including screen-time restrictions, content filters and privacy settings.
However, teen TikTok accounts contained a hidden link that allowed users to unlink from "family pairing," according to a 2021 internal chat filed as evidence in the lawsuit.
"This renders the function kinda pointless," noted Jordon Furlong, Group Product Manager, Digital Wellness between 2021 and 2024, in the chat.
TikTok said it notifies parents' accounts when a minor unlinks from family pairing.
"Rabbit holes of harmful content"
Among the most serious concerns raised in the testimony was TikTok's handling of content related to suicide and self-harm for young users.
Testimony from Eric Han, who was TikTok's head of safety from April 2019 through June 2023, detailed internal chats he'd engaged in concerning "rabbit holes" — the company's term for when the algorithm gets stuck showing the user the same type of content over and over again.
Han said he became aware of this problem in April 2020, and acknowledged that rabbit holes could be harmful, such as ones focusing on body image or suicide, and could violate TikTok's policies.
An internal report authored and circulated by Han in 2020 and discussed in his testimony stated that there is a "Real contagion effect. Suicidal ideation and behavior, and the way that it is talked about on the platform."
In a draft of TikTok's 2020 "Minor Safety Policy Annual Review", which was also quoted in Han's deposition, included bullet points stating: "Social media is inherently dangerous, and all minors are at risk when they engage on the platform" and "Minor Safety is an urgent issue that we must address effectively."
Despite this, Han said the platform did not warn parents of the potential dangers of TikTok.
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