TikTok child safety warnings: 112,000 Live videos in one month

The records are depositions of current and former TikTok employees, filed in federal court in March 2026 and newly reported this week. They belong to a huge multi-district case, started in 2022, that bundles hundreds of lawsuits claiming TikTok, Meta, Google and Snap built platforms that harm users under 18 and didn’t disclose risks they knew about.

Here’s what employees flagged, according to the filings:

• Sexual content involving minors on Live. Staff warned that minors were appearing in sexual content that viewers paid to access, and that TikTok earned money from it.
• Age loopholes. Users under 18 were finding ways around age-restricted content.
• Blocking parents. Teens were also using loopholes to stop parents and guardians from reviewing their activity through Family Pairing, TikTok’s parental control tool.
• No age surveys. TikTok held off on surveys to measure its users’ ages because it was concerned the FTC would ask for the results.

None of this has been tested in front of a jury yet. The cases against TikTok haven’t gone to trial, so the depositions haven’t been entered as trial evidence.

The most striking testimony comes from Reagen Maher, who held senior safety and investigations roles at TikTok from 2021 to 2024. She described months of trying to push the problem up the chain, and testified that her findings reached V Pappas, the company’s chief operating officer at the time.

In an internal chat read out during her deposition, Maher complained to a colleague that she had spent months arguing for a fix with people who felt the harms weren’t serious enough.

Her main concern was what she called transactional sexual content on TikTok Live. Live lets viewers send streamers virtual “gifts” that can be turned into real money through a payment platform or a bank transfer, and TikTok keeps a share. A 2022 investigation by a business magazine reported that minors were stripping on Live in exchange for gifts. Maher testified that TikTok already knew about the exploitation before that report came out.

The internal probe that produced the 112,000 figure also listed risks including adult predators grooming children, and found TikTok received “significant revenue” from gifts sent to livestreams that broke its own rules.

The problems weren’t limited to Live. Eric Han, TikTok’s former head of safety, testified that in 2020 he worried about algorithm rabbit holes, where the app keeps feeding a user more of the same kind of video. In an internal report, he described a “real contagion effect” around suicide-related content.

A draft of TikTok’s 2020 minor safety annual review, quoted in the testimony, called minor safety “an urgent issue that we must address effectively.” Han said TikTok still didn’t warn parents about the potential dangers.

TikTok has made some changes. In 2021 it introduced age-based settings that limit features for 13 to 17-year-olds, including restrictions on direct messages and on broadcasting with TikTok Live. The company has also said it proactively removes suspected underage users, gives teens a default daily screen time limit, and that accounts belonging to under-16s start out private. The testimony suggests some teens were getting around those protections anyway.

Most child safety lawsuits against social apps focus on addictive design. These filings add a financial question: what happens when a platform takes a cut of payments tied to the exploitation of a child?

In the US, federal law can make a company criminally liable for knowingly benefiting from a child sex trafficking venture, said Silvija Krupena, who leads the Financial Intelligence Unit at RedCompass Labs, a UK consultancy. Platforms are also required to report apparent child sexual abuse material and online enticement to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children once they have actual knowledge of it. Money made from these crimes can count as criminal proceeds, and knowingly processing it can amount to money laundering. In each case, what the company knew is central.

TikTok didn’t answer questions about whether it reported revenue from rule-breaking livestreams to US financial regulators or shut down the accounts paying for that content. It declined to give a statement and pointed to policies on its website.

Lawsuits move slowly. Your teen’s phone doesn’t. A few practical steps, based on the gaps the testimony describes:

1. Check Family Pairing is still linked. The filings say teens found ways to stop parents from seeing their activity, so open the tool on your own phone and confirm the connection and settings are still in place.
2. Ask about Live. Broadcasting on TikTok Live is restricted for younger teens, but the records show kids aged 13 to 15 appeared in Live videos in large numbers. Ask directly whether your child watches or goes live, and whether anyone has sent them gifts.
3. Confirm the real age on the account. Protections depend on the birthday entered at sign-up. An account set up with a fake older age misses the teen defaults.
4. Talk about gifts and money. Explain that anyone offering gifts or payments for anything on camera is a red flag, and that they can come to you without getting in trouble.

The pressure is building on several fronts. TikTok has already settled some cases before trial, including one in Los Angeles that went on against YouTube and Meta, where a jury found those two companies built their apps to hook young users. Separately, TikTok settled with a school district in rural Kentucky for $8 million in May, and in September it agreed to a $100 million settlement with Alabama over claims it made its app addictive to minors.

The federal case where these depositions were filed is still ongoing. If TikTok’s cases do reach a jury, this testimony could become evidence, and the question of why the company never measured its users’ ages is likely to come up again.