Senators press TikTok over withholding of safety features for some users

Two U.S. senators are demanding answers from the social media giant TikTok following media reports that the company intentionally turned off security features for a subset of users to test how the protections would impact their engagement with the app. 

In a letter on Wednesday, Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) criticized the company for having “knowingly withheld a critical safety measure for millions of American users—including children—in order to determine whether protecting users would impact its financial bottom-line.”

The missive follows reporting by Bloomberg earlier this month based off a confidential company document analyzing the account activity of Chase Nasca, a 16-year-old who killed himself in February 2022 after viewing a stream of content related to sadness and suicide. Nasca, the document revealed, was part of a control group comprising about 10 percent of the platform’s user base for which changes the company made to the algorithm to prevent repeated exposure to harmful subjects were withheld. 

The company review found the teen had viewed more than 7,500 videos in the two weeks leading up to his death, with 73% having themes of sadness or personal struggles and 10% violating the company’s rules around the normalization of suicide or self harm. 

“TikTok’s filter bubble prevention strategies did not take effect on this user by design,” the internal review found.  

In response to questions about the document, the company told Bloomberg: “We continue to invest significantly in Trust & Safety, including robust detection systems and dedicated enforcement teams that proactively remove content that violates our Community Guidelines.” TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Recorded Future News.

In their letter, the senators pointed to the incident as an example of why they support the Kids Online Safety Act, which advanced out of the Senate Commerce Committee on August 5. 

“When signed into law, KOSA will address exactly the kind of conduct these disclosures raise: platforms designing products and algorithms to maximize addiction while children bear the consequences,” they said. Despite progress on the bill, it is unlikely it will pass during this legislative session, as differences remain over the inclusion of legal requirements for companies to prevent causing foreseeable harm. 

The senators requested answers by September 1 from the company to a list of questions related to what they called “experiments” in which A/B tests were conducted and security features were disabled for some users. They called on the company to release the full report surrounding Nasca’s death and queried why minors were included in control groups. 

The controversy coincides with a heavily watched trial this week involving Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — and four state attorneys general who accuse the company of deliberately making their products addictive to minors.