Unsealed court filings say TikTok gave tens of thousands of users a feed-reset button that did nothing, then measured the effect on viewing time and ad revenue.
New York's attorney general says TikTok gave tens of thousands of users, including kids and teens, a fake version of its Algo Refresh feature in 2023. The tool is meant to reset your For You feed, but users in the placebo groups saw no change even though the app said it worked.
The complaint also says even the working reset covered only 200 videos before old viewing history returned. TikTok says the claims mischaracterize the feature and that testing is normal. The allegations are unproven. For parents, the lesson is simple: don't rely on one safety button, and check what your kids' feeds actually show.
Imagine your teenager taps a button to wipe their TikTok feed clean and escape a stream of upsetting videos. The app says it worked. Nothing changed. That’s what New York says happened to tens of thousands of TikTok users, including children and teens, in experiments the company ran in 2023.
If your family uses TikTok, this goes to the heart of whether safety tools can be trusted. The allegations come from newly unsealed filings in New York Attorney General Letitia James’s lawsuit, and they claim TikTok handed some users a “ghost” version of a safety feature while it studied how the real one affected viewing time and advertising money.
New York says TikTok gave randomly chosen users a fake version of Algo Refresh, a feature that is supposed to reset the videos recommended on your For You feed. People who switched it on believed their feed had been reset. It hadn’t, unlike the feeds of users who got the working version.
According to the amended complaint, TikTok ran three of these placebo experiments in 2023:
In total, that’s more than 63,000 placements. Some people may have been counted more than once, so the number of individual users could be lower. Users weren’t told they were part of a test.
The state says TikTok compared the two groups to see how a working reset changed time spent on the app and ad revenue.
The test didn’t go ahead without pushback. According to the complaint, a product manager on TikTok’s Digital Well Being team raised concerns in an internal chat, arguing that the feature existed to give users transparency and control over the algorithm and warning that users could find a fake version misleading. “A placebo group completely conflicts with that,” the manager wrote.
Another employee defended the approach as standard product testing, in which the visible part of a feature stays in place while the part that does the work is switched off.
New York also says the working feature didn’t do what TikTok implied. TikTok introduced Algo Refresh in March 2023 as a way to reset your recommendations if you got stuck seeing the same kind of unwanted content.
The complaint alleges the reset applied to only 200 videos. After that, TikTok went back to using your previous viewing history to pick videos. Personalized ads kept drawing on your history the whole time. The state also says TikTok presented the reset as permanent when it was only temporary, so a user trying to escape harmful content could end up back where they started.
TikTok disputes the claims. Spokesperson Nathaniel Brown said that, like most companies, TikTok continuously improves its platform and regularly tests new products and features to see how they work in the real world. A spokesperson also said the allegations mischaracterize how Algo Refresh works. The company has broadly denied New York’s claims in court and says keeping young users safe is a priority.
None of the allegations has been proven in court.
James first sued TikTok in October 2024, alongside 14 other state attorneys general, accusing it of designing an addictive app and misleading families about safety. The new details come from an amended complaint filed under seal at the end of August and unsealed by a judge on October 7. Many documents in state cases have been sealed or heavily redacted as TikTok has tried to keep its internal workings private.
The filings also describe a separate experiment. In early 2022, TikTok allegedly withheld a protection meant to break up repetitive streams of videos about depression, self-harm and similar topics from about 10% of US users, an estimated 15 million people. The complaint links that test to the case of a New York teenager who later died. After that experiment was first reported in August, Senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal sent TikTok written questions about it.
More than two dozen states have now sued TikTok. Alabama became the first to win a deal: in September, TikTok settled for as much as $300 million and promised to change how its app works for teens in that state, ahead of what would have been the first trial.
The case doesn’t change how TikTok works today, but it’s a reminder not to treat any single safety button as a fix.
It’s a feature launched in March 2023 that resets the videos TikTok recommends on your For You feed, meant to help you escape unwanted content.
New York says some users got a fake version of Algo Refresh that looked like it worked but didn’t change their feed, so TikTok could compare them with users who got the real one.
No. TikTok says the lawsuit mischaracterizes Algo Refresh and that testing features is normal, and it has denied New York’s allegations in court.
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