TikTok was repeatedly warned by employees about the risks the social media platform posed to children, according to court records obtained by NPR. The documents say employees were frustrated with how executives responded to their concerns about risks to children, including sexual exploitation and exposure to suicide-related content.
Depositions of employees filed in March 2026 are shedding new light on TikTok’s child safety practices.
According to NPR, TikTok employees warned that minors were appearing in sexual content that was available for purchase on TikTok, raising concerns that the company could profit from potentially illegal activity. They also flagged that minors were exploiting loopholes to access age-restricted content and hide their activity from parents.
Additionally, the court documents show that TikTok didn’t conduct surveys to determine the age of its users out of concern that it would have to share the results with the Federal Trade Commission.
“These citations and claims 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,” a TikTok spokesperson said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. “It’s unfortunate that NPR has chosen to ignore the numerous documents and resources we have provided that demonstrate how these claims mischaracterize our record and platform features.”
The statement continues, “We have invested billions of dollars in Trust & Safety and rolled out more than 50 preset safety, privacy, and security settings for teens, including Family Pairing, which helps parents and guardians customize the experience for their teens. We remain steadfast in our commitment to the well-being of our community.”
TikTok, in addition to Meta, Google, and Snap, faces hundreds of lawsuits consolidated in federal court. The lawsuits allege that these companies’ platforms harm minors and that they failed to disclose known risks to young users.
TikTok has reached settlements in several of these cases before they went to trial, including one in Los Angeles where a jury found that Meta and YouTube had designed their platforms to be addictive to young users.
Update 10/20/2026 10:00 a.m. PT: The article was updated to include a statement from TikTok.
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Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Aisha holds an honours bachelor’s degree from University of Toronto and a master’s degree in journalism from Western University.
You can contact or verify outreach from Aisha by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at aisha_malik.01 on Signal.
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