TikTok reaches $400M settlement over child privacy

TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, have agreed to pay $400 million to settle a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit alleging the platform violated federal children’s online privacy protections. The case, filed in 2024 under the Biden administration, alleged TikTok violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by allowing millions of children under 13 to use the platform while collecting their personal information without the required parental consent. Beyond the $400 million payment, the settlement includes measures meant to strengthen protections for young users, including stronger age-related controls, additional safeguards for children, and tools giving parents more oversight of their children’s activity and personal information. The agreement doesn’t require TikTok or ByteDance to admit wrongdoing; Axios first reported the settlement.

The 2024 lawsuit alleged TikTok let large numbers of children stay on the platform for years despite already facing federal action over children’s privacy once before: in 2019, the company agreed to pay $5.7 million to settle allegations that its predecessor app, Musical.ly, had violated COPPA, and committed at the time to keep children under 13 off the platform. According to the more recent allegations, TikTok continued to struggle to identify and remove underage users, kept and used children’s data — including for targeted advertising — even after employees raised concerns, and changed registration policies in ways that made it harder to verify whether users were old enough to join.

The settlement lands amid separate scrutiny of TikTok’s approach to user safety: days before it was announced, Bloomberg reported that TikTok had intentionally disabled an algorithmic safeguard designed to reduce the chance of users being overwhelmed by harmful content, for roughly 10% of U.S. users, as part of an experiment. That report drew criticism from lawmakers; Republican senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut sent a letter to TikTok CEO Shou Chew and Adam Presser, the head of the company’s U.S. business, questioning the decision.

Why it matters

A $400 million settlement is real money, but the no-admission clause and the parallel safeguard-disabling report both point to the same open question regulators keep circling back to: whether TikTok’s compliance changes outpace its product experiments, or just follow them.