TikTok’s research reportedly acknowledges negative effects on teens

In Brief

Court documents suggest that TikTok executives are aware of the app’s potential harm to teenagers, according to reporting by NPR and Kentucky Public Radio.

Fourteen U.S. attorneys general sued TikTok earlier this week, claiming that the app harms children’s mental health. Much of the material in those suits was redacted, but reporters were able to read some of that material by copy-pasting.

According to Kentucky’s lawsuit, the company’s own research shows that “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.”

In addition, the suit includes internal communication around a feature allowing parents to limit their children’s TikTok usage — apparently the feature only reduced usage by an average of 1.5 minutes per day, with the company instead measuring its success based on “improving public trust in the TikTok platform via media coverage.”

A TikTok spokesperson said it was “highly irresponsible” for NPR to publish excerpts from the lawsuit, which he claimed “cherry-picks misleading quotes and takes outdated documents out of context to misrepresent our commitment to community safety.”