TikTok allegedly gave thousands of users non-working versions of a safety feature after they tried to activate it, according to claims in a newly unsealed lawsuit filed by New York against the company.
The lawsuit says TikTok carried out so-called “ghost” or placebo tests involving thousands of people, including teenagers and children, who had chosen safety tools such as “Algo Refresh.” The feature was designed for users who wanted to reset their recommendations and move away from unwanted or potentially harmful content.
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Those users were led to believe the feature had been enabled, the lawsuit alleges. But their video feeds remained unchanged, unlike the feeds of users who received the fully functioning version.
The allegations appear in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ case against TikTok, one of more than two dozen lawsuits brought by states accusing the company of engineering its platform to foster addiction among children and of misleading users about its safety measures.
The claims are part of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit against the social media company
According to the lawsuit, TikTok presents safety as a central priority and promotes its platform as suitable for children and teenagers. At the same time, the company knowingly blocked some groups from accessing certain safety tools, including users who had specifically tried to avoid unwanted or potentially harmful material, the complaint alleges.
“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 rejected New York’s allegations in court filings, while maintaining that protecting young users remains a priority.
In September, TikTok resolved the first state case scheduled for trial by agreeing to pay Alabama as much as $300 million and alter the way its platform operates for teenagers in the state.
Ms James, a Democrat, first sued TikTok in 2024. The claims concerning the experiments appeared in an amended, sealed version of New York’s complaint filed in late August, which a judge later ordered to be made public.
Employee flagged test
A TikTok product manager working in Digital Well Being warned internally that using placebo tests for Algo Refresh was problematic and could deceive users, according to the lawsuit.
“This feature is about algorithm transparency and control,” the employee wrote in an internal chat, the lawsuit says.
“A placebo group completely conflicts with that.”
Despite the concern, TikTok repeatedly ran the experiments on thousands of users in 2023, comparing people who did not receive the feature with those who did. The company was studying how long users remained on the platform and how the tests affected advertising revenue, the lawsuit alleges.
The complaint further accuses TikTok of misrepresenting Algo Refresh by telling users it would reset the algorithm behind their video recommendations, when the change was actually temporary.
A TikTok spokesperson said the allegations mischaracterize the way Algo Refresh operates.
The newly unsealed sections also describe a separate series of experiments previously reported by Bloomberg.
In those tests, TikTok randomly selected users and disabled safety features on their accounts that were intended to limit exposure to harmful content.
A teenage boy in New York who took part in the test died by suicide after being shown material about self-harm and suicide, Bloomberg reported. Internal reviews found that the boy had been exposed to an “onslaught” of such content, according to the lawsuit.
