New York accuses TikTok of testing a fake safety tool on thousands of teenagers

Unsealed court filings say thousands of accounts, including children's, received a placebo version of Algo Refresh in 2023 while the company measured time spent on the app and the effect on advertising revenue. TikTok says that account of the feature is incorrect.

New York's attorney general has accused TikTok of handing thousands of children and teenagers a version of a safety tool that did nothing, while the company measured how long they stayed on the platform.

The allegation appears in court filings that a judge ordered unsealed on 7 October. They form part of a child safety lawsuit filed by Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, in 2024 and updated in a sealed filing in late August. The documents describe placebo tests of a feature called Algo Refresh, run on thousands of accounts during 2023. TikTok disputes the way the lawsuit describes the feature.

What the unsealed filings say

Algo Refresh is presented in the filings as an option for users who want to move away from unwanted or potentially harmful recommendations. It is designed to reset the algorithm that suggests videos, wiping a feed's history and showing popular, general content, as if the account were new.

According to the complaint, thousands of users switched the feature on believing their feed would change. Those who received a fake version kept seeing the same recommendations, unlike users who received the working tool. The filings describe the participants as being in a placebo group, receiving a version that appeared to activate but never carried out the reset, and say they did not know they were part of a test with no effect on their accounts.

The court records, previously sealed, show that TikTok repeated the experiment across thousands of accounts during 2023, comparing time spent on the platform and the impact on advertising revenue between users who had the real tool and those who did not. The complaint also questions how TikTok described the feature: the company said it reset the recommendation algorithm, but the filing alleges the real effect lasted only a short time.

The documents carry a further allegation: that TikTok, which says publicly that safety is a priority and that the platform is suitable for teenagers, deliberately limited access to protection tools for users who had explicitly asked for them.

Separately, Bloomberg reported in August that TikTok withheld a safety update from about 10 per cent of its US users, roughly 15 million people, so that their behaviour could be compared with those who had it. A 16-year-old from New York in that group reportedly died by suicide in 2022 after seeing self-harm and suicide content. That forms part of the attorney general's legal argument and is not a court finding about responsibility for the young person's death.

An internal warning before the tests

The filings cite a message from a product manager in TikTok's Digital Wellbeing team who objected to the placebo design before the tests were carried out. "This feature is about transparency and control of the algorithm. A placebo group conflicts completely with that," the manager wrote.

The company went ahead with the experiments regardless, according to the complaint.

TikTok's response

A TikTok spokesperson said the company continuously improves its platform and, like most companies, regularly tests new products and features "to validate the experience and understand how they work in the real world". The spokesperson also said the lawsuit's characterisation of Algo Refresh is incorrect.

The company has broadly denied New York's allegations in its own court filings and has said the safety of young users is a priority.

In one court filing TikTok acknowledged that its tests "may involve a portion of platform traffic that continued to receive the original experience", while rejecting the suggestion that this made users less safe.

The passages made public so far do not give an exact number of users in the placebo group or say what the test found. These are allegations in an amended complaint, not findings of a court, and no trial date has been made public.

A wider legal campaign

The New York case is one of more than two dozen state lawsuits accusing TikTok of designing its platform to encourage teen social media addiction and of misleading users about its safety measures. In October 2024, James led a coalition of 14 state attorneys general who filed separate actions against the company, accusing it of deceiving the public about safety and harming the mental health of young people, including by creating addiction.

New York also alleges that the app's 60-minute screen time limit for under-18s can be bypassed in seconds without parental approval, and that features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications and beauty filters were built to drive compulsive use. The state is seeking civil penalties, disgorgement of profits, restitution and a court order requiring changes to how the app works for minors.

In September, TikTok resolved the first state case that was scheduled for trial, agreeing to pay Alabama at least £76 million (US$100 million), rising to as much as £227 million (US$300 million), with reports differing on what triggers the higher figure, and to change how the platform works for teenagers in that state. That TikTok compensation settlement does not resolve the New York lawsuit, which James, a Democrat, filed in 2024.

In August, TikTok and ByteDance also agreed to pay at least £227 million (US$300 million), rising to £303 million (US$400 million) if a court vacates an earlier consent decree, to settle a separate claim brought under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The lawsuit had accused the company of allowing accounts for children under 13 without their parents' permission and of collecting personal information about them.

Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, faces its own accusations. Prosecutors allege that features such as infinite scrolling and constant notifications were built to keep young users engaged and to increase profit, and that the company concealed internal research said to warn of anxiety, depression and eating disorders among the young. Other claims accuse Meta of collecting data on children under 13 without parental consent. On 26 August, Meta announced a settlement of the state attorneys general Meta lawsuit over addictive design: at least £9.2 billion (US$12.1 billion), rising to up to £13.0 billion (US$17.1 billion) according to the New York Attorney General (Meta and Reuters put the maximum at about £13.6 billion, or US$18 billion). All of these matters are allegations made in litigation.

Background: the wider picture

The following background comes from our own verified fact files on social media court cases. On 10 September 2026, a judge in Texas found TikTok liable for deceiving parents about how safe the app is, with a separate trial on penalties due the following month. A trial of two further personal injury plaintiffs against Meta, YouTube and Snap is set to begin in Los Angeles on 28 October 2026; a second trial due in July did not go ahead after TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube settled with the plaintiff. In the European Union, the European Commission sent preliminary findings on 24 July 2026 that TikTok accounts for under-18s do not meet Digital Services Act safety standards, because young people could set their accounts to public, allowing content from users aged 16 and 17 to be recommended to anyone. Together these form part of a run of social media harm claims now working through the courts.

The New York case remains open. The attorney general's office has said it will keep presenting unsealed evidence from the file as the proceedings against the platform continue.

Anyone affected by the issues in this article can contact Samaritans free on 116 123 or at samaritans.org.

Families who want to know more can read about how a social media harm claim works and who can claim.