Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway announced a formal investigation on October 14 into whether TikTok deceived families and put children at risk through the platform’s design, issuing a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) that orders the company to turn over internal documents by November 13.

“Parents deserve the truth about how TikTok interacts with their children, how the platform identifies underage users, and what content it pushes into their feeds,” Hanaway said in a press release. “If TikTok has misled families, concealed risks, or engineered features that harm Missouri children, our office will act without hesitation.”

The CID, filed under the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, directs TikTok to explain how its recommendation system selects and promotes content for users under 13, teens under 18, and young adults under 24, including the data signals the algorithm weighs and how it determines a user’s age. The demand also seeks internal communications on strategies to increase young users’ time on the platform, records on dangerous online challenges and fake or inauthentic accounts, and any coordination with outside youth-safety organizations. TikTok must additionally produce internal research into problematic use, mental health effects, and exposure to harmful material among young users, along with documents tied to a 2019 FTC consent decree the company entered into as Musical.ly.

Missouri’s demand arrives roughly a week after unsealed allegations in New York Attorney General Letitia James’s lawsuit against TikTok accused the company of running undisclosed experiments that gave thousands of users, including children and teens, a non-functional version of a safety feature called “Algo Refresh” while telling them it had taken effect. According to that complaint, TikTok tested the placebo version in 2023 to measure its effect on time spent and ad revenue, over the internal objection of a product manager on its Digital Well Being team. TikTok has denied the characterization and says protecting young users is a priority.

The Missouri CID lands amid a broader wave of state scrutiny. More than two dozen states have sued TikTok over claims it designed the platform to be addictive to children and misrepresented its safety measures, and the company reached its first settlement among those suits in September, agreeing to pay Alabama up to $300 million and alter how the platform functions for teen users there. TikTok separately reached a roughly $400 million settlement with the Department of Justice over alleged violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, an agreement a federal judge has since raised objections to.

Missouri’s investigation also directly targets the “For You” recommendation system, the subject of a December 2021 New York Times report on an internal document TikTok called “TikTok Algo 101.” The CID asks TikTok to identify and explain the weighting of every data element the Times report disclosed.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Check Out Our Podcast