TikTok's own employees repeatedly warned the company about serious risks its platform posed to children, and those warnings did not translate into adequate action from senior leadership, according to court records obtained by NPR. The depositions, filed in federal court in March and previously unreported, describe an internal culture in which safety staff raised alarms about minors bypassing age restrictions and appearing in sexualized content that the company could profit from — while executives were seen as insufficiently responsive.

What the depositions allege

One deposition comes from Reagen Maher, who held senior safety and investigations roles at TikTok between 2021 and 2024. Maher described flagging "transactional sexual content" to then-CEO V Pappas, specifically minors stripping on TikTok's Live feature in exchange for "gifts" that can be converted into real currency. Forbes reported on the issue in 2022, but Maher said the company was already aware of the sexual exploitation concerns before that article was published.

In an excerpt from an internal chat with a colleague, Maher wrote: "I have been fighting about fixing this for months with people who didn't think the harms are severe enough." The message continued that senior leaders knew about the issue, that some projects were underway to address parts of it, and that Maher hoped the forthcoming article would "put a fire behind other potential solutions."

A second deposition from Eric Han, TikTok's former head of safety, says he was concerned about harmful algorithm "rabbit holes" as early as 2020. Han described a "real contagion effect" regarding "suicidal ideation and behavior" in an internal TikTok report. Despite flagging that "minor safety is an urgent issue that we must address effectively," Han said TikTok failed to warn parents about the potential dangers their children faced on the platform.

The litigation behind the disclosures

The depositions are connected to a multi-district litigation initiated in 2022 that consolidates hundreds of lawsuits against TikTok, Meta, Snap, and Google. The suits allege that these companies knew their social media platforms were harmful to children and failed to disclose those risks. The filings offer a rare look inside how safety teams at a major platform document and escalate concerns — and how those concerns are weighed against product and revenue considerations.

Why it matters for platform accountability

The disclosures matter beyond TikTok. They illustrate a recurring pattern in platform governance: safety staff identify a harm, document it internally, and escalate it, but the fix competes with engagement metrics and monetization features such as Live gifts. For developers and trust-and-safety engineers, the depositions underline the importance of escalation paths that carry real authority, and of logging that survives discovery. Internal reports and chat excerpts are now central evidence in litigation that could shape how platforms design age verification, parental controls, and recommendation systems.

The allegations also arrive amid broader regulatory and legal pressure. The same litigation tracks related actions against other platforms, and the filings could inform how courts and regulators assess whether companies acted on known risks. For TikTok, the question is less whether employees knew — the records indicate they did — than whether leadership's response matched the severity of what was reported.

What happens next

The depositions will feed into the multi-district litigation as the consolidated cases proceed, where internal warnings and executive responses are likely to be scrutinized. How TikTok characterizes its remediation efforts, and whether those efforts predated or followed public reporting, will be a central factual dispute. For the technology industry, the case adds to a growing body of evidence that the gap between internal awareness and executive action is where platform safety failures often live.