TikTok employees repeatedly warned company leadership about risks to children on the platform, including minors appearing in sexual content, bypassing age restrictions and encountering harmful material through recommendations, according to court records reviewed by NPR.

The previously unreported depositions, filed in US federal court in March 2026, describe employees who were frustrated with how senior leaders responded to their concerns. The testimony forms part of a wider legal battle examining whether major social media companies adequately addressed risks their platforms posed to young users.

The allegations place renewed attention on TikTok’s content moderation, age-verification systems, livestreaming features and the responsibilities of technology companies when their services are used by children.

Employees raised concerns about sexual exploitation on TikTok Live

One of the most serious issues described in the court records involved minors appearing in sexual content on TikTok Live, where viewers can send virtual gifts that may be converted into money.

According to NPR’s reporting, Reagen Maher, who held senior safety and investigation roles at TikTok between 2021 and 2024, testified that she had repeatedly tried to escalate concerns about transactional sexual content involving minors.

Maher described spending months trying to persuade senior leaders to address the risks. Her testimony included an internal message expressing frustration that some colleagues did not consider the harms sufficiently serious.

An internal investigation discussed in the court filings reportedly found that children aged 13 to 15 appeared in 112,000 TikTok Live videos in January 2022 alone. The findings raised concerns about potential grooming, exploitation and the possibility of abusive material being distributed through the platform.

The records also raised questions about the money generated when viewers sent gifts to livestreams that violated platform rules.

These disclosures do not, by themselves, establish that every identified video involved illegal activity or that a court has determined TikTok committed a crime. They do, however, highlight the seriousness of the risks employees said they were investigating.

Age restrictions and parental controls also came under scrutiny

Employees reportedly warned that some users under 18 could exploit loopholes to access age-restricted content or prevent parents and guardians from monitoring their activity through TikTok’s family-supervision tools.

Age-based settings and parental controls are designed to limit young users’ exposure to certain features and content. Their effectiveness depends, however, on how reliably the platform identifies users’ ages and whether its safeguards can be circumvented.

The court records also indicate that TikTok refrained from conducting surveys to establish users’ actual ages because of concerns about potentially having to turn the results over to the US Federal Trade Commission.

That issue raises a broader question for social media platforms: how can companies reliably measure whether their child-safety protections are working if they lack accurate information about the ages of their users?

The depositions do not mean that all TikTok accounts belonging to minors are unprotected. Rather, they describe alleged weaknesses that employees believed required greater attention.

Staff also warned about harmful recommendation patterns

The testimony went beyond livestreaming and age restrictions.

Eric Han, TikTok’s former head of safety, discussed concerns about recommendation patterns that could repeatedly expose users to similar material, creating what the company called content “rabbit holes.”

According to NPR’s reporting, Han raised concerns about repeated exposure to subjects such as suicide and body image, particularly when vulnerable young users were involved.

The issue is central to ongoing debates about algorithmic recommendations. A system designed to predict what someone wants to watch can continually serve similar material, potentially narrowing the content a user encounters.

For younger audiences, the concern is whether such patterns can reinforce harmful ideas or behaviours—and whether platforms can identify and interrupt them quickly enough.

The testimony describes concerns raised internally; it does not establish that every user exposed to such recommendations experienced harm.

TikTok declined to provide a statement to NPR

NPR reported that it repeatedly sought comment from TikTok about the issues raised in the court records. The company declined to provide a statement for the report but directed the publication to previously published company policies.

TikTok’s published safeguards include age-based settings and family-supervision features. The central question raised by the testimony is whether those policies and tools adequately addressed the problems employees said they had identified.

The distinction matters: having a safety policy is not the same as demonstrating that it consistently prevents exploitation, restricts harmful content or responds effectively when internal teams identify weaknesses.

The allegations form part of wider social media litigation

TikTok, Meta, Snap and Google are among the companies facing lawsuits consolidated in US federal multidistrict litigation initiated in 2022. The cases allege that social media platforms were designed in ways that harmed under-18 users and that the companies knew about risks they failed to disclose adequately.

The employee depositions described by NPR have not been presented as evidence at a jury trial in the TikTok cases, and the allegations remain subject to the legal process.

The litigation is part of a wider examination of social media companies’ responsibilities to young users, including questions about addictive design, content recommendations, age verification and the effectiveness of parental controls.

What this means for parents and technology platforms

The disclosures underline why child safety cannot depend entirely on parents monitoring screen time. Platforms also need effective age-assurance systems, responsive reporting channels, safeguards against sexual exploitation and transparent processes for investigating internal warnings.

Parents and guardians can take practical steps by reviewing family-supervision settings, discussing livestreaming and online interactions with children, restricting contact from unknown adults where possible, and reporting suspected exploitation through the platform’s official channels.

For technology companies, the wider challenge is ensuring that safety teams have the authority and resources to escalate serious concerns and that identified risks lead to measurable changes in products and enforcement.

The most consequential issue in this report is not simply that TikTok faced child-safety problems. It is the allegation that employees raised concerns internally and became frustrated with the response from senior leadership.

The testimony puts a spotlight on the gap that can exist between a platform’s published safety commitments and the implementation of those commitments in practice.

The next developments to watch are how the litigation progresses, whether further records become public and what evidence emerges about the effectiveness of TikTok’s safeguards.