TikTok executives and employees were well aware for many years that the company's app is addictive to teenagers, according to unredacted documents from the lawsuit filed in part by the Kentucky Attorney General's Office.
Here's how this came to light:
- 14 attorneys general are suing TikTok for “falsely claiming [that it's] safe for young people.”
- The lawsuit alleges that the app was “specifically designed to be an addiction machine, targeting children who are still in the process of developing appropriate self-control.”
- The attorneys general obtained reams of internal communications and internal studies as part of the lawsuit's discovery process.
- At TikTok's request, the states redacted privileged and confidential parts of the suit.
- However Kentucky's blacking-out did not work, and NPR's Sylvia Goodman at Kentucky Public Radio was able to copy and paste a blacked-out portion to reveal the contents.
NPR's Bobby Allyn said about the discovery:
“It's been pretty startling. This material is quite damning. And again, these details have not been made public before, including company officials admitting in these internal messages that features like a time-on-app reminder are not expected to reduce screen time, as advertised, but instead aimed at, quote, ‘improving public trust.' There was an internal TikTok document that found the exact number of videos it took before someone formed a habit – 260 videos. And Kentucky authorities said that could boil down to just spending 35 minutes on the app, since the videos are so short on TikTok.”
Here's what else NPR discovered in the documents:
- TikTok demotes unattractive people off the main feed to make room for the creators it deems more attractive.
- TikTok's own research found 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.”
- A TikTok executive spoke about the app's algorithm potentially addicting minors. The executive said that the company needs to think about how the app might deprive young people of opportunities, “And when I say other opportunities, I literally mean sleep and eating and moving around the room and looking at someone in the eyes.”
- The app's time management tool doesn't help keep young users away from the app, as it's quickly and easily bypassable. When the app is set to limit view time at 60 minutes per day, teens were still spending 107 minutes on TikTok, which is only 1.5 minutes shorter than the average use of 108.5 minutes before the tool was launched.
- TikTok knew that the tool would be ineffective, and based the success of the tool on how it “improv[ed] public trust in the TikTok platform via media coverage.”
- TikTok knew that “filter bubbles” were a real thing — which is when users find themselves sucked into certain painful and sad content the more they watched it.
- An internal investigation found that underage girls on the app were getting “gifts” and “coins” in exchange for live stripping.
TikTok spokesman Alex Haurek told NPR that the Kentucky Attorney General's complaint “cherry-picks misleading quotes and takes outdated documents out of context to misrepresent our commitment to community safety.”
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't — but either way though, I agree with Bobby Allyn… the revelations are quite damning!