NPR reports that TikTok staff raised the alarm on youth bypassing age restrictions as well as being sexually exploited on the platform.

A report on court documents involved in a TikTok child-safety trial show the company had knowledge of major platform problems that put minors at risk.

Court documents on some of the inner workings of TikTok paint a picture of a tech company repeatedly warned by its own staff about the dangers its platform posed to minors — and then ignoring many of those warnings.

According to an investigation from NPR, unsubmitted depositions from an ongoing multistate trial against TikTok, Meta, Google and Snap reveal that TikTok executives knew that underage users were circumventing its age restrictions. Internal documents also reportedly show that some minors were engaging in sexually exploitative acts using TikTok’s own platform features, including its Live video streaming tool.

The NPR report cites the deposition of Reagan Maher, who worked in safety at the company in the early 2020s, addressing the fallout from a damning 2022 Forbes story about child exploitation on the platform. Maher said she informed senior leaders at the company that kids aged 13 to 15 were accessing features meant for adults, such as monetized live video.

A spokesperson for TikTok told CNET in an email that the information in the NPR report was “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.”

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