Hundreds of thousands of children have bypassed Tik-Tok’s minimum age restrictions to use the social media platform’s LIVE feature, which incentivizes sexual content, sometimes viewed by predatory adults. And an internal TikTok investigation suggested the platform’s virtual currency was being used in “major money laundering criminal patterns.”That’s according to previously redacted documents that were released Friday as part of Utah’s ongoing lawsuit against TikTok, claiming the social media company is violating the state’s deceptive acts or practices law and consumer sales practices act.The lawsuit, filed in June 2024, accuses TikTok of using a monetization feature to incentivize minors to perform sexually explicit acts on its LIVE feature — TikTok then takes a “significant cut” from those virtual transactions, Utah alleges.In a statement to Utah News Dispatch on Friday, a TikTok spokesperson said the lawsuit ignores proactive measures that the company has voluntarily implemented. That includes “robust safety protections,” screen time limits for teen accounts, tools that allow parents to supervise their kids, live streaming requirements and “aggressive enforcement of our Community Guidelines on an ongoing basis,” the spokesperson said.“The complaint cherry-picks misleading quotes and outdated documents and presents them out of context, which distorts our commitment to the safety of our community,” the spokesperson said. “We stand by our efforts.”In the original complaint, 28 of 176 paragraphs were largely redacted, with TikTok classifying the content as confidential business records or trade secrets under Utah law. The company fought to keep the redactions but on Dec. 20, Utah’s 3rd District Court Judge Coral Sanchez ruled that most of the content should be released to the public. In his ruling, Sanchez wrote that just 10 paragraphs should remain redacted, mostly because they include the money content creators have netted on TikTok.Detailed in the unredacted complaint is Project Meramec, an internal investigation launched by TikTok that found 112,000 children between 13 and 15 years old were able to use TikTok LIVE during January 2022 alone. Per TikTok’s guidelines, users must be at least 18 years old to access LIVE.TikTok LIVE was introduced in 2019 and has since become “extraordinarily popular,” the complaint states. It includes a monetization feature where viewers can purchase virtual currency and gifts, which can then be exchanged for real money. According to attorneys for Utah, creators are promised more money by TikTok based on how popular their content becomes.TikTok’s own study concluded that LIVE enabled the “‘exploitation of live ...
