TikTok Pays 400 Million Dollars for the Child Accounts It Could Not Find for Seven Years: the Settlement Contains No Admission of Guilt

Four hundred million dollars (around 345 million euros) is the price TikTok and its parent ByteDance paid to close the US Department of Justice lawsuit. The charge: for years they let children under 13 onto the platform and collected their personal data without parents knowing anything about it.

The settlement requires no admission of guilt. That is the key sentence in this whole story and it is worth reading twice. The company pays, changes a few settings, and legally speaking - nothing happened.

The lawsuit began in 2024, under the US law on protecting children's privacy online. According to the charge, TikTok knew there were children on the platform and kept them there for years. Worse: those children's data ended up in the targeted advertising system, while employees inside the company had already raised the alarm that something was wrong.

But this is not the first time. In 2019 the same company paid 5.7 million dollars for the same violation, then through its predecessor Musical.ly, and promised to prevent under-13s from opening accounts. Seven years later the bill is seventy times bigger. The question that asks itself: does the penalty function as a penalty at all, or is it just a cost written into the budget?

The charge goes a step further - it claims the company changed its registration rules in a way that made age verification harder. In other words, the system did not fail by accident.

The timing is almost comic. Only days before the settlement, a report emerged that TikTok deliberately switched off algorithmic protection for around 10 percent of US users - as an experiment. That protection existed to limit harmful content reaching the user. Two US senators, a Republican and a Democrat, sent a letter to CEO Shou Chew demanding an explanation. When Washington unites across party lines, it usually means the situation really is bad.

In Europe, regulation on protecting minors' data is stricter on paper than the American version. The question is how much of that reaches the screen of a child in Skopje, opening the same app with the same algorithm behind it.