By Diana Novak Jones
Oct 7 (Reuters) - TikTok ran an experiment on thousands of users who tried to turn on a safety feature on the platform, giving them non-functional versions of the tool, according to allegations in New York’s lawsuit against the company unsealed on Wednesday.
In the so-called “ghost” or placebo experiments, TikTok selected thousands of users, including teens and children, who opted to use safety features like “Algo Refresh,” a tool designed to reset recommendations for users seeking
to escape unwanted or potentially harmful content. According to the lawsuit, those users believed they had activated the feature, but their feeds did not change, unlike users who got the fully working version.
The newly unsealed allegations are part of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit against the company, one of more than two dozen brought by states accusing TikTok of designing its platform to addict children and of misleading users about its safety. Many documents in state cases across the country have been sealed or heavily redacted as TikTok has sought to keep details about its operations from public view.
The lawsuit claims TikTok assures users that safety is a top priority and that its platform is appropriate for kids and teens, while knowingly preventing some groups of users from accessing certain safety tools, including users who had specifically sought to avoid unwanted or potentially harmful content.
"We continuously make improvements to our platform which means that, like most companies, we regularly test new products and features to validate the experience and understand how they work in the real world," a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement.
The company has broadly denied New York's allegations in court filings and has said that keeping young users safe is a priority.
In September, TikTok settled the first state lawsuit set for trial, agreeing to pay Alabama up to $300 million and change how its platform functions for teens in the state.
James, a Democrat, originally sued in 2024. The claims about the tests were included in an updated, sealed version of New York’s complaint filed at the end of August and later ordered unsealed by a judge.
EMPLOYEE FLAGGED TEST
Internally, a product manager for Digital Well Being at TikTok said doing placebo tests on the Algo Refresh feature was problematic and that users might find it misleading, the lawsuit alleges.
“This feature is about algorithm transparency and control,” the person wrote in an internal chat, according to the lawsuit. “A placebo group completely conflicts with that.”
Ultimately the company did the tests repeatedly on thousands of users in 2023, comparing users who did not get the feature with those who did to study how long users stayed on the site and the impact on ad revenue, the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit also alleges that TikTok misled consumers about how “Algo Refresh” worked, telling them it would reset the algorithm that recommended videos to them when it was only a temporary change.
The unsealed portions of the lawsuit also allege that TikTok conducted a separate set of experiments, which were previously revealed in a report by Bloomberg. In them, TikTok randomly selected users and turned off safety features on their accounts that limited their exposure to harmful content. A teen boy in New York who was part of the test committed suicide after he was shown content about self-harm and suicide, Bloomberg reported.
Internal reviews showed the boy had been shown an “onslaught” of content about suicide and self-harm, the lawsuit said.
(Reporting by Diana Novak Jones, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and David Gregorio)
