Blackburn, Blumenthal Press TikTok for Intentionally Withholding Safety Features From Children
August 20, 2026
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) sent a letter to TikTok regarding a recent report that the social media company endangered children by knowingly withholding an algorithmic safety measure from millions of American users to determine whether the safeguard would reduce engagement on its platform.
In the letter, Senator Blackburn and Senator Blumenthal requested a prompt response to a detailed list of questions, including whether TikTok conducted a risk assessment before the experiment, what the results of the experiment were, and how many U.S. users TikTok has placed in experiments that withheld safety features. Senator Blackburn and Senator Blumenthal’s Kids Online Safety Act would require social media platforms like TikTok to design their products with child safety in mind.
New Report Reveals TikTok Conducted Harmful Experiment on 15 Million U.S. Users
“According to reports, TikTok developed changes to its recommendation algorithm intended to prevent users from being repeatedly and intentionally exposed to potentially harmful content, including videos concerning sadness, loneliness, extreme dieting, and other sensitive subjects. In December 2021, TikTok publicly announced that it was testing ways to avoid recommending clusters of similar content that could be harmful when viewed repeatedly. TikTok did not disclose, however, its depraved decision to intentionally withhold these protections from approximately 10 percent of its U.S. users—a control group that reportedly represented approximately 15 million Americans at the time… TikTok appeared fixated on whether the safety measure would affect user engagement or the ‘stickiness’ of the platform —trying to put the price tag on safety. Even more troubling, this control group, presumably intentionally, included minors.”
TikTok Intentionally Disabled Safety Filters for a 16-Year-Old Who Later Died by Suicide
“One of those minors was 16-year-old Chase Nasca. According to an internal TikTok report, Chase was placed into a ‘backtest’ experiment in January 2022, meaning that TikTok’s ‘filter bubble prevention strategies did not take effect on this user by design.’ In the weeks that followed, TikTok reportedly recommended Chase thousands of videos involving themes of sadness, hopelessness, loneliness, suicide, and self-harm. Chase died by suicide in February 2022. TikTok’s own internal review reportedly examined the 7,563 videos Chase viewed during the final two weeks of his life and found that 73 percent contained themes such as sadness or personal struggles, while nearly 10 percent violated TikTok’s own policies. TikTok intentionally withheld from Chase the exact safety protections that were developed to interrupt precisely this deluge of abuse.”
Despite Warning, TikTok Actively Pushed Videos on Self-Harm, Suicide, and Eating Disorders to Children
“These revelations are appalling, but they are made even more sinister because TikTok was on notice about the effects of its recommendation algorithms on children. In 2021, we spearheaded a series of hearings examining the repeated failures of social media companies to protect children online. On October 26, 2021, our Subcommittee on Consumer Protection convened a hearing at which TikTok testified before Congress about the safety of its platform. At that time, we raised concerns that social media platforms were prioritizing engagement and profit over the safety of children and that recommendation algorithms could drive young users into increasingly extreme and harmful content. Those concerns were not hypothetical. At the hearing, we discussed reports of children being pulled into algorithmic ‘rabbit holes’ involving extreme dieting, eating disorders, and other harmful material. TikTok was directly confronted with evidence about the precise danger at issue here: recommendation systems repeatedly serving harmful content to children. At the time, we requested documents from TikTok about its research and data on teenage mental health issues—in response, TikTok sent the Subcommittee screenshots of its website and publicly-available third-party reports. Yet just months later, your company nevertheless decided that millions of users could be denied an available safety protection in order to measure the effect that protection would have on engagement… The reported decision to intentionally withhold an available safety intervention from minors underscores why voluntary promises from companies like TikTok are insufficient and why meaningful transparency and accountability are necessary.”
Click here to read the full letter.
