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, but previously unreported court records show the company’s leadership failed to act on their warnings.
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, according to reports. Employees said they were frustrated with how leadership responded.
Alarms about exploitation
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, according to reports. 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.
Reagen Maher, a former senior safety employee who worked at TikTok from 2021 to 2024, said in her deposition that underage users could stream sexually suggestive content on TikTok Live and receive virtual gifts convertible to real money, raising fears of transactional sexual exploitation, according to reports. She escalated her concerns to then-COO V Pappas. TikTok also refrained from conducting surveys to assess users’ ages because it was concerned it would have to turn the results over to the Federal Trade Commission, the documents show.
A wider reckoning
TikTok, alongside Meta, Google and Snap, is a defendant in multi-district litigation initiated in 2022 coordinating hundreds of lawsuits alleging the platforms are designed to harm users under 18 and that the companies knew of risks they did not disclose, according to reports. NPR repeatedly sought comment from TikTok; after extended communications, the company declined to provide a statement. The newly unsealed records are likely to intensify pressure on all four companies as the litigation moves forward.
