TikTok Staff Testified They Raised Child Safety Alarms Internally. New York Alleges Placebo Safety Tools

TikTok employees repeatedly raised concerns inside the company about risks the app posed to children. That is the account in staff depositions filed in federal court in March 2026 and reviewed by NPR.

The testimony covers sexual exploitation, exposure to suicide content, and what staffers described as frustration with how leadership responded.

None of it has been put before a jury. The depositions have not been submitted as evidence at trial, and the allegations remain allegations.

What employees say they flagged

The depositions describe workers warning that minors were appearing in sexual content on the app. Viewers could pay to access that content, and TikTok would profit from it. NPR describes that as a potential financial crime.

Staffers also flagged that users under 18 were using loopholes to get around age-restricted content. Some were blocking parents and guardians from reviewing their activity.

The filings also say TikTok refrained from surveying the ages of its users. The reason given in the documents: the company worried it would have to turn the results over to the Federal Trade Commission.

Reagen Maher held senior roles in safety and investigations at TikTok from 2021 to 2024. In her deposition she described going on a "crusade" for several months to push safety issues up to some of the company's top executives. She testified that her findings were escalated to V Pappas, TikTok's chief operating officer at the time.

In an internal chat excerpt read out in her testimony, Maher 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 and watching that content. She also stated the company was aware of the sexual exploitation of minors on the platform before a 2022 Forbes article reported that minors had been stripping on TikTok's Live feature, sometimes in exchange for digital currency known as a "gift."

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.

The company's response

NPR repeatedly sought comment from TikTok. After extended communications, the company declined to provide a statement. It pointed NPR to company policies already published on its website.

That leaves the employees' testimony, and the company's silence on it, as the current state of the record.

New York's separate allegations

A different set of claims comes from New York Attorney General Letitia James. Her office filed an amended complaint on August 31, unsealed October 7. It builds on the state's 2024 consumer protection suit accusing TikTok of designing an addictive platform while misleading families about safety.

The complaint alleges TikTok ran undisclosed experiments on users. It says the company assigned people to "ghost" or placebo versions of Algo Refresh, a feature TikTok introduced in March 2023 to let users reset their For You recommendations.

According to the complaint, the numbers break down this way:

• More than 19,000 users were placed in a placebo group before launch.
• More than 28,000 followed in April 2023.
• More than 16,000 followed in May 2023.

That totals more than 63,000 placements. Those are experiment placements, not necessarily distinct people.

Users in those groups believed they had reset their recommendations. The complaint says the algorithm kept running without the reset. TikTok allegedly compared them against users with the working feature, measuring time spent and advertising revenue.

An internal Digital Well Being product manager objected, according to the complaint. The employee wrote: "This feature is about algorithm transparency and control. A placebo group completely conflicts with that." Another employee defended the technique as a common approach to product testing.

The 2022 experiment and the Long Island teenager

The complaint also describes an earlier test, in early 2022. TikTok allegedly withheld an algorithmic protection meant to interrupt repetitive exposure to distressing content from approximately 10 percent of U.S. users. The reporting puts that at an estimated 15 million people.

One of those users was a 16-year-old Long Island teenager who subsequently died by suicide after being repeatedly shown videos involving self-harm, depression and suicide. An internal TikTok review later found that his exposure to repetitive harmful content was linked to the company's decision to withhold the protection from his account. The findings document that decision and the content he encountered; they do not, by themselves, establish that TikTok caused his death.

Those are the state's allegations. No court has ruled on them.

The wider litigation

TikTok is a defendant, alongside Meta, Google and Snap, in multi-district litigation begun in 2022. It coordinates hundreds of lawsuits alleging the platforms are designed to harm users under 18, and that the companies knew about risks they did not disclose.

TikTok has settled several cases before trial, including one tied to a landmark Los Angeles trial earlier this year. In that trial, a jury found co-defendants YouTube and Meta designed their platforms to be addictive to young users.

TikTok agreed in May to pay $8 million to settle a youth mental health and addiction suit brought by a school district in rural Kentucky. In September it agreed to a $100 million settlement with the state of Alabama. Alabama had alleged the platform was designed to be addictive to minors and exposed them to harmful content.

The pattern is that TikTok has settled to avoid juries while its co-defendants went to trial. As a result, the depositions and the New York filing have not yet faced cross-examination in open court.