TikTok Staff Warned Bosses That Kids Were Being Paid in Gifts for Sexual Content on Live, Court Records Show

For years, TikTok employees told their bosses that children were appearing in sexual content on TikTok Live, that viewers were paying for it with virtual gifts, and that the company was taking a share of that money. They also flagged loopholes that let teens slip past age limits and algorithmic "rabbit holes" that pushed suicide content. Previously unreported depositions filed in federal court in March, first reported by NPR, show staff frustrated at how slowly leadership moved.

What leaders knew, and when, is the question that matters. Knowledge is what turns a moderation failure into potential legal exposure over exploitation proceeds and reporting duties, and TikTok is a defendant in a sprawling case coordinating hundreds of lawsuits over harm to minors. The records come from pretrial litigation. They have not been presented as evidence at trial, and nothing in them has been proven.

A months-long crusade

Reagen Maher, who held senior safety and investigations roles from 2021 to 2024, described a months-long "crusade" to get safety problems in front of top executives. Her findings were escalated to V Pappas, then TikTok's chief operating officer. "I have been fighting about fixing this for months with people who didn't think the harms are severe enough," she wrote in an internal chat read during her testimony.

Her main worry was "transactional sexual content." When Forbes reported in 2022 that minors were stripping on TikTok Live, sometimes for gifts that convert to money, Maher said the company already knew. "Put simply, senior leaders know about this issue," she wrote at the time, adding that she hoped the article would put "a fire behind other potential solutions."

TikTok had restricted Live broadcasting for 13 to 17 year olds in 2021. Yet an internal investigation found children aged 13 to 15 in 112,000 Live videos in January 2022 alone, according to employee testimony. The report flagged risks of adult predators grooming children and the creation of child sexual abuse material, and found TikTok earned "significant revenue" from gifts sent to streams that broke its rules.

The gift is the payment

Silvija Krupena, who runs the Financial Intelligence Unit at UK consultancy RedCompass Labs, said an adult sending a child virtual gifts for sexual acts on a livestream is paying for the sexual exploitation of a child. "The gift is the payment," she said. "Strip out the language of gifts, coins and diamonds, and the allegation is clear then. An adult paid. A child was exploited. The platform took a cut."

In her reading, US law can impose criminal liability on a company that knowingly benefits from a child sex trafficking venture. Money from such offences can be criminal proceeds, knowingly processing it could amount to money laundering, and anti-money laundering duties may apply if gifting counts as money transmission. Platforms with actual knowledge of apparent abuse material must report it to NCMEC. That is why warnings to executives matter so much, she said.

TikTok did not say whether it reported all such Live videos to NCMEC, closed accounts it found paying for them, filed suspicious activity reports with FinCEN, or kept the revenue.

Loopholes and rabbit holes

Maher testified that children could reach an 18-plus version of TikTok by signing up through Google, Facebook or Instagram, and that senior leadership knew. In 2018, after the Musical.ly merger, executives shaped a user survey to avoid questions revealing ages. Then head of TikTok Live Adam Wang confirmed that offering elementary school as an answer "is definitely violating COPPA." In a chat, he worried that the FTC "might want us to submit the results" if it learned of the survey.

Family pairing, launched in 2020, gave teen accounts a hidden link to unlink from their parents, a 2021 chat showed. "This renders the function kinda pointless," wrote product manager Jordon Furlong. TikTok says it notifies parents when a minor unlinks.

Eric Han, head of safety from 2019 to 2023, learned of rabbit holes in April 2020 and described a "real contagion effect" around suicidal ideation. A draft 2020 policy review stated that "all minors are at risk when they engage on the platform." Han said the platform did not warn parents.

TikTok pushes back

Spokesperson Nathaniel Brown called the claims "clearly cherry-picked at the behest of trial lawyers and used to inaccurately rewrite our history and mislead the public about our commitment to youth safety and how our platform works." TikTok said its anti-money laundering program meets international standards.

The company has settled several cases before trial, including $8 million with a Kentucky school district in May and $100 million with Alabama in September. Similar pressure is spreading to AI, where eight states sued OpenAI over ChatGPT and kids. No case against TikTok has yet reached a jury.

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