New York alleges TikTok gave thousands of users, including teens, a nonworking Algo Refresh in 2023 tests

TikTok ran experiments in which thousands of users who switched on a safety tool got a version that did nothing, according to allegations in New York's lawsuit against the company that a judge ordered unsealed on Wednesday, Oct. 7.

The allegations are unproven. TikTok has broadly denied New York's claims in court filings.

What the complaint alleges

The feature at issue is Algo Refresh, a tool meant to let users reset their For You recommendations and escape unwanted or potentially harmful content.

New York alleges TikTok selected thousands of users, including teens and children, who opted in, then placed some in "ghost" or placebo groups. Those users believed they had activated the feature. Their feeds did not change. Users in the comparison group got the fully working version.

The complaint says TikTok ran these tests repeatedly in 2023. It alleges the purpose was to measure how long users stayed on the app and what the feature did to ad revenue.

The filing is an amended complaint James filed under seal at the end of August. A judge later ordered it unsealed.

The employee objection

The lawsuit says a product manager on TikTok's Digital Well Being team objected internally. The manager said the placebo tests were problematic and that users might find them misleading.

"This feature is about algorithm transparency and control," the manager wrote in an internal chat, according to the complaint. "A placebo group completely conflicts with that."

The company went ahead with the tests anyway, the lawsuit alleges.

New York also claims TikTok misled consumers about what Algo Refresh does even when it works. TikTok presents it as a reset of the recommendation system. The state says the change to a user's feed is only temporary.

TikTok's response

TikTok spokesperson Nathaniel Brown gave the company's position in a statement: "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 has also said the lawsuit mischaracterizes how Algo Refresh works. It says keeping young users safe is a priority.

That is a defensible description of ordinary product testing. Companies do run A/B tests. The narrower issue in this case is whether users who deliberately turned on a safety control were told it was working when, in the test group, it was not. A court has not answered that.

A second set of tests

The unsealed material also covers separate experiments. Bloomberg reported earlier this year that TikTok withheld a safety update from roughly 10% of its U.S. users, about 15 million people. The lawsuit says protections meant to limit exposure to harmful content were disabled for randomly selected users.

Bloomberg reported that a New York teenager in that group died by suicide. Per the Next Web's account of the filing, he was 16 and died in 2022. The lawsuit says internal reviews found he had been shown a flood of suicide and self-harm content.

Senators Marsha Blackburn, a Republican, and Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, sent TikTok 13 written questions about that test after the Bloomberg report.

TikTok's statement on testing does not address the teenager's death, and the sources do not show the company responding to that specific allegation.

The larger legal fight

James, a Democrat, first sued in October 2024. Her original complaint said the company lied about how safe its tools were, including a feature called Refresh. More than two dozen states have since filed similar suits accusing TikTok of designing its app to addict children and misleading users about safety.

TikTok has fought to keep its operations out of public view. Many documents in the state cases have been sealed or heavily redacted.

In September, TikTok settled the first of those cases set for trial. It agreed to pay Alabama up to $300 million and to change how its platform functions for teens in that state.

Parents are the ones who decide whether a child has this app. They are entitled to know whether the controls the company advertises actually work. If the allegations hold up, the controls on some accounts did not, and the company's own employee said so at the time.

The New York case now moves forward with these claims in the public record. TikTok's next filings will show whether it contests the facts of the 2023 tests or only the legal conclusions New York draws from them.

The Alabama deal sets a dollar figure for what a state can extract before trial.