Newly surfaced court depositions show TikTok employees repeatedly escalated concerns about child sexual exploitation, suicide content, and parental-control loopholes to senior executives, including then-chief operating officer V Pappas, according to an NPR report published October 20.

The depositions, filed in federal court in March 2026 as part of multi-district litigation against TikTok, Meta, Google and Snap, have not yet been submitted as trial evidence. TikTok is one of four platforms named in litigation consolidated since 2022 alleging the companies designed their products to be addictive and harmful to users under 18.

Reagen Maher, who held senior safety and investigations roles at TikTok from 2021 to 2024, testified that she spent months trying to elevate concerns about “transactional sexual content,” including minors appearing in and viewing it. In an internal chat read into her deposition, Maher wrote: “I have been fighting about fixing this for months with people who didn’t think the harms are severe enough.” She testified TikTok was aware of sexual exploitation on the platform before a 2022 Forbes article reported that minors were stripping on TikTok Live in exchange for virtual gifts convertible to cash. An internal investigation cited in the filings found children between 13 and 15 appeared in 112,000 TikTok Live videos in January 2022 alone, and found the company received “significant revenue” from gifts sent to livestreams that violated its own rules.

Silvija Krupena, Director of the Financial Intelligence Unit at consultancy RedCompass Labs, said the arrangement described in the filings could carry legal exposure. “If an adult pays a child, through virtual gifts, for sexual acts on a livestream, that is payment for the sexual exploitation of a child. The gift is the payment,” Krupena said. “Strip out the language of gifts, coins and diamonds, and the allegation is clear then. An adult paid. A child was exploited. The platform took a cut.”

Maher’s testimony also described a loophole allowing minors to access an 18-plus version of TikTok by signing up through Google, Facebook or Instagram, which she said senior leadership knew about. Separately, a 2021 internal chat filed in the litigation described a hidden link that let teen accounts unlink from “family pairing” parental controls. Jordon Furlong, a Group Product Manager on TikTok’s Digital Wellness team from 2021 to 2024, wrote that the workaround “renders the function kinda pointless.”

Eric Han, TikTok’s Head of Safety from April 2019 to June 2023, testified about internal concern over “rabbit holes,” the company’s term for the algorithm repeatedly surfacing the same content type. An internal report he authored in 2020 cited a “real contagion effect” around suicidal ideation discussed on the platform, and a draft safety review from the same year stated that “minor safety is an urgent issue that we must address effectively.” Han said the company did not warn parents of the risk.

Court records also show TikTok held off on surveying its U.S. user base after acquiring Musical.ly in 2018 and excluded questions that could reveal users’ ages, amid concerns about scrutiny under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Then-Head of TikTok Live Adam Wang and Musical.ly co-founder Alex Zhu discussed excluding school-grade questions from a planned survey because “having elementary school [as an answer] is definitely violating COPPA,” according to testimony, with Wang writing in a chat at the time: “If the FTC knows about this survey, they might want us to submit the results, and I am not sure if it’s a good result.”

TikTok did not provide NPR a statement before publication, directing the outlet instead to previously published company policies. After publication, a TikTok spokesperson said the citations in the story were “clearly cherry-picked at the behest of trial lawyers” and misrepresented the company’s safety record. TikTok said it maintains an anti-money-laundering program consistent with industry standards, but did not answer questions about whether it reported the identified Live videos to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children or how it handled revenue linked to the content.

The depositions add to a run of legal exposure for TikTok on youth safety. The company settled an Alabama lawsuit for up to $300 million in September and a Kentucky school district’s mental-health and addiction suit for $8 million in May. 

New York Attorney General Letitia James’s separate suit against TikTok, unsealed in part this month, alleges the company ran undisclosed experiments giving some users a non-functional “placebo” version of its Algo Refresh safety tool while telling them it was active, testing the effect on time spent and ad revenue. That filing also references a set of experiments in which TikTok randomly disabled harmful-content safeguards for some users; a teen included in that test died by suicide after exposure to self-harm content. TikTok has also reached a roughly $400 million settlement with the Department of Justice over alleged COPPA violations tied to accounts opened by children under 13, which a federal judge has since raised objections to.

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