Safety Measures Ineffective
TikTok is supposed to be inaccessible to anyone under 13 years of age, but the lawsuit alleges that the app does not utilize age verification software. Moreover, moderators were told not to remove users reportedly under this age unless their account specifically says that they are 13 years old or under.
It also takes aim at the measures TikTok has put into place for teenagers, which include warnings when their usage hits certain levels. The material published suggests that these nudges have a “negligible impact.”
It quotes that TikTok’s own research revealed that the average time per day that teens spent on the platform went from 108.5 minutes to about 107 minutes when it deployed the prompt.
“TikTok measured the success of the tool, however, not by whether it actually reduced the time teens spent on the platform to address this harm, but by three unrelated ‘success metrics,’ the first of which was ‘improving public trust in the TikTok platform via media coverage.’” – the lawsuit against TikTok.
It also states that TikTok did absolutely nothing to then change the design of the tool to deal with this excessive usage.
