TikTok employees warned senior leaders about risks to children on the platform, but some staffers felt their concerns were not treated as urgent, according to court records obtained by NPR. The accounts describe warnings about minors accessing age-restricted material, sexualized content on TikTok Live and recommendation feeds that could lead users into harmful “rabbit holes.”
The previously unreported depositions were filed in federal court in March as part of multidistrict litigation that began in 2022. The cases combine hundreds of lawsuits alleging TikTok, Meta, Snap and Google knew their social platforms could harm children and failed to disclose those risks. The depositions are testimony in ongoing litigation, not findings that a court has established the allegations as fact.
Reagen Maher, who held senior safety and investigations roles at TikTok from 2021 to 2024, said she raised concerns with then-CEO V Pappas about “transactional sexual content” on TikTok Live. The concern involved minors stripping in exchange for virtual “gifts” that can be converted into real currency. Maher said TikTok knew about exploitation concerns before Forbes reported on the issue in 2022.
In an internal chat excerpt included in her deposition, Maher wrote that she had been “fighting about fixing this for months” with people who did not think the harms were severe enough. She said senior leaders knew about the issue and that some projects were underway, while hoping the Forbes story would push other solutions forward. That is a particularly revealing description of safety work: not an absence of awareness, but an argument over whether the problem merited action.
Former TikTok head of safety Eric Han described a separate warning. In 2020, he raised concerns about algorithmic “rabbit holes,” saying they could have a “real contagion effect” involving suicidal ideation and behavior, according to an internal report cited in his deposition. Han also said TikTok failed to warn parents about potential dangers their children faced on the platform, despite identifying minor safety as an urgent issue.
Recommendation systems do not independently decide what counts as acceptable risk. People set their objectives, define safety thresholds and choose how quickly to respond when the system produces harmful outcomes. And when a platform’s features encourage engagement—sometimes through gifts that carry monetary value—safety interventions can collide with product and business priorities. The records described here do not establish that executives deliberately put revenue ahead of child safety. They do put a sharper question on the table: what did TikTok do after its own employees identified the risks, and how quickly?
That question now sits inside litigation involving several major social platforms. For families and users, the distinction between “we knew” and “we acted” is not semantic. It is the part that determines whether a warning changes the product or merely becomes another item in the company’s internal record.
Sources: Glitch Please! and The Verge — https://www.theverge.com/tech/1014250/tiktok-employees-internal-child-safety-warnings — Source article; reports on NPR’s account of court records and deposition testimony., NPR — Reporting outlet that obtained the court records, as cited by The Verge.
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