TikTok employees warned of child safety risks that executives ignored
Previously unreported court records reveal a systemic pattern of employees warning about child exploitation on the platform and being rebuffed by TikTok leadership. Court depositions, filed in March 2026, provide a stark portrait of how one of the world's largest social media companies handled -- or failed to handle -- risks identified by its own staff.
What the depositions show
According to employee depositions filed in U.S. federal court, Reagen Maher, who held senior safety and investigations roles at TikTok between 2018 and 2024, described an "crusade" of several months to elevate safety concerns to the company's highest executives. In an internal chat message excerpt read during the deposition, Maher wrote: "I have been fighting about fixing this for months with people who didn't think the harms are severe enough."
An internal investigation report found 112,000 TikTok Live videos featuring children aged 13 to 15 in January 2022 alone. The same report identified risks including adult predators grooming children and the creation of child sexual abuse material, and found that TikTok received "significant revenue" from gifts sent to streams that violated the platform's rules.
Another deposition from Eric Han, TikTok's head of safety from April 2019 through June 2023, detailed internal chats about "rabbit holes" — the company's term for when the algorithm gets stuck showing the user the same type of content repeatedly — which often led to harmful content for minors.
Virtual gifts as currency of exploitation
The most alarming point from the depositions was the question of virtual gifts. Maher answered deposition questions about a 2022 Forbes report that documented minors stripping on TikTok Live, sometimes in exchange for digital currency that could be converted to money through payment platforms or bank transfers.
Maher stated that the company was already aware of the sexual exploitation of minors on the platform before the Forbes article was published in April 2022.
"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," said Silvija Krupena, director of the Financial Intelligence Unit at RedCompass Labs, a UK-based consultancy, to NPR. "Strip out the language of gifts, coins and diamonds, and the allegation becomes clear: an adult paid. A child was exploited. The platform profited."
Age loopholes and oversight avoidance
The court records also revealed that employees flagged that users under 18 used loopholes to bypass age-restricted content. A specific loophole allowed children to access the 18+ version of TikTok if they signed up via Google, Facebook, or Instagram.
Furthermore, TikTok refrained from conducting surveys to assess user ages because it was concerned about having to deliver results to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), according to the documents. This raised questions about whether the company was deliberately avoiding obtaining internal evidence of minor usage.
The company also blocked parents and guardians from reviewing their children's activity on the platform, despite employee warnings about the risk of sexual exploitation and suicide content.
The company's silence and legal implications
TikTok did not respond to NPR's questions about its anti-money laundering protocols, including whether it filed suspicious activity reports to FinCEN, the U.S. Treasury Department's financial crimes unit responsible for combating money laundering, related to revenues from TikTok Live videos containing illegal material.
The company also declined to provide a statement on the issues raised in the court documents, though it directed NPR to safety policies it had previously published on its website.
U.S. federal law can impose criminal liability on a company that knowingly benefits from participation in child sex trafficking ventures, according to Krupena. If the gift system qualifies as regulated money transmission, anti-money laundering obligations may follow.
Knowledge is crucial, especially when assessing potential criminal liability, which is why warnings to executives matter so much. If the company knew and did not act, the defense of "ignorance" becomes much harder to maintain.
The broader litigation context
These depositions sit within a broader context of multi-state litigation initiated in 2022, coordinating hundreds of lawsuits against social media platforms including Meta, Google/YouTube, Snap, and TikTok, alleging these platforms are designed to harm users under 18.
In a landmark trial in Los Angeles earlier in 2026, a jury found that Meta and YouTube designed their platforms to harm teenagers' mental health, with Meta being held liable for billions in damages. TikTok has not yet had a similar case go to a jury, but the depositions now revealed add a new chapter to the narrative.
TikTok has already settled several cases in the multi-state litigation before they reached trial, including the Los Angeles case. But the depositions revealed by NPR were not submitted as trial evidence — because cases against TikTok have yet to be heard by a jury.
Why this matters
What the documents reveal is not just about content moderation failures, but about a systemic corporate governance failure: employees who identified real risks were systematically ignored by leadership that prioritized growth over safety.
This has direct implications for algorithmic transparency, an increasingly relevant topic in the debate over AI and social media regulation in the United States. If the company knew about risks and did not act, the question is not just ethical but potentially legal — especially considering TikTok is being restructured under a deal involving Oracle, Trump, and Silver Lake Partners, reducing Chinese ByteDance's control.
The question remains: if employees like Reagen Maher had been heard in 2022, how many millions of videos featuring minors in sexual content would never have been published — and how many children would have been protected before being exploited?
Sources: NPR, The Verge, Forbes
✓ Independent sources cross-checked and verified before publishing
