Internal Depositions Show TikTok Staff Warned Executives About Child Safety Risks for Years
Court filings reveal employees flagged minors bypassing age restrictions and appearing in monetized sexual content, with one safety official saying leadership didn't think "the harms are severe enough."
TikTok's own employees repeatedly warned company leadership about child safety risks on the platform, according to court records obtained by NPR, raising new questions about how the company handled internal concerns that it has publicly downplayed.
The depositions, filed in federal court in March but not previously reported, stem from a sprawling multi-district lawsuit first brought together in 2022. That litigation combines hundreds of individual cases accusing TikTok, along with Meta, Snap, and Google, of knowing their platforms harmed children and failing to disclose it.
One of the more striking accounts comes from Reagen Maher, who held senior safety and investigations roles at TikTok between 2021 and 2024. Maher testified about raising alarms to then-CEO V Pappas over what the deposition describes as "transactional sexual content" on TikTok Live, the platform's livestreaming feature. According to the filing, minors were stripping on Live in exchange for virtual "gifts" that users can convert into actual money, a dynamic that meant TikTok stood to financially benefit from the exploitation.
The issue wasn't news to the company when Forbes reported on it in 2022. Maher said TikTok was already aware of the sexual exploitation concerns before that story published. In an internal chat exchange cited in the deposition, Maher described months of internal pushback: "I have been fighting about fixing this for months with people who didn't think the harms are severe enough." Maher added that senior leaders were aware of the issue, that some fixes were already in progress, and expressed hope that the Forbes article would push the company to move faster on other solutions.
A separate deposition from Eric Han, TikTok's former head of safety, points to a different but related failure. Han said he flagged concerns in 2020 about the platform's recommendation algorithm creating harmful "rabbit holes" for young users. In an internal report, Han reportedly described these algorithmic patterns as having a "real contagion effect" tied to suicidal ideation and behavior among minors. Han also wrote that "minor safety is an urgent issue that we must address effectively." Despite that internal recognition, Han said TikTok never warned parents about the risks their children faced on the platform.
Why this matters now
The depositions land as the broader fight over TikTok, and over social media's effect on children generally, remains unresolved on multiple fronts. The 2022 multi-district litigation at the center of these filings groups TikTok with Meta, Snap, and Google, all facing similar allegations that they understood the risks their products posed to young users and chose not to act or disclose them. These court records give that argument something concrete: direct testimony from people who worked inside TikTok's safety organization and said they tried, and largely failed, to get executives to treat the problems as urgent.
What makes the accounts notable isn't that TikTok had safety problems. Every major platform wrestles with abuse, exploitation, and algorithmic harm at scale. It's that, according to these depositions, the company's own safety staff identified specific, serious issues, including monetized sexual content involving minors and an algorithm linked internally to suicidal ideation, and leadership either moved too slowly or not at all. Maher's account suggests the holdup wasn't a lack of awareness but a disagreement over severity. Han's account suggests TikTok made a deliberate choice not to inform parents even after flagging the risk internally.
Neither deposition excerpt, as reported, includes a response from TikTok. But the material now sits in the federal court record as part of a case that could force the company to answer for what its own employees said they knew. For a platform that has spent years fending off scrutiny over its effects on young users, from regulators, from parents, and from Congress, testimony like this from former insiders is a different kind of problem than an outside investigation. It's a paper trail showing the company's own safety team saw the danger coming and said so, repeatedly, before the public ever found out.
