TikTok employees warned that sexual content involving minors was being sold on the platform, and management didn't listen: the company says the quotes were cherry-picked

TikTok employees repeatedly warned management that the platform was dangerous for children, and the way their bosses responded left them frustrated. That is what court documents obtained by US public radio NPR show: sworn statements by employees, filed in March 2026, that talk about sexual exploitation and exposure to suicide-related content.

The warnings weren't abstract. Employees reported that minors were appearing in sexual content that can be bought on TikTok - meaning the company may have been profiting from potentially illegal activity. They also reported that children were using loopholes in the system to reach age-restricted content and to hide their activity from their parents.

The heaviest detail concerns users' ages. According to the documents, TikTok did not run surveys to establish how old the people on the platform are, because it feared it would have to share the results with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The logic is as old as institutions themselves: if you don't know how many children are on your platform, nobody can easily ask what you've done for them. Ignorance, in that case, becomes a business decision.

The company hits back hard. "These quotes and claims are clearly cherry-picked at the request of the plaintiffs' lawyers and used to inaccurately rewrite our history and mislead the public about our commitment to youth safety," a TikTok spokesperson said. The company says it has invested billions of dollars in trust and safety and introduced more than 50 default-on safety and privacy settings for teenagers, including Family Pairing, which lets parents tailor their children's experience.

TikTok isn't the only one being sued. Together with Meta, Google and Snap, it faces hundreds of lawsuits consolidated in federal court, alleging that the platforms harm minors and failed to disclose risks they knew about. TikTok has already settled several of the cases before they reached trial, including one in Los Angeles, where a jury later found that Meta and YouTube had designed their platforms to be addictive for young people. How many more records like these have to come out before a regulator - in America or in Europe - stops relying on the companies' own word?