TikTok has until September 1 to tell two senators why it kept an algorithmic safety feature away from millions of US users so it could measure what the feature cost in engagement. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, and Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, want details on that experiment and any others like it, and they asked whether TikTok has ever shelved a safety feature over what it would do to ad revenue. The 2021 change was meant to stop the For You feed from serving repetitive clusters of one content category, and TikTok held it back from a control group that included a teenager who later died, per Bloomberg’s reporting on a sealed internal document. The test began weeks after a TikTok official was questioned at a hearing by both senators about protecting children.
