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TikTok accused of secret safety tests involving teens and 15 million users

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TikTok accused of secret safety tests involving teens and 15 million users

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TikTok accused of secret safety tests involving teens and 15 million users

New York Attorney General Letitia James has accused TikTok of secretly testing a safety feature on 15 million US users, including teens, in a lawsuit over child safety on the platform.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has added new allegations to a child safety lawsuit against TikTok Inc., accusing the platform of running secret experiments on teen users. The new claims are attributed to a Bloomberg Businessweek report, based on a confidential TikTok document, about an algorithmic test the company began in 2021 that impacted about 15 million US users, including one teen who died by suicide. For the experiment, TikTok withheld a new safety feature from 10% of US users in order to test whether the change reduced user time on the platform.

“As a result, TikTok has subjected users whom TikTok included in such A/B tests to an experience that TikTok has made less safe by design,” James said in the amended lawsuit, which includes details of the experiment that were previously sealed from public view. The teen who died by suicide was in the test group that didn’t get the safety features TikTok rolled out. ” However, the company denied that those tests make the platform less safe for those users. “We continuously make improvements to our platform which means that, like most companies, we regularly test new products and features to validate the experience and understand how they work in the real world,” the company said in a statement.


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