TikTok pays $100 million to settle Alabama teen safety lawsuit

TikTok has agreed to pay Alabama at least $100 million and impose new restrictions on teenage users in the state, settling a lawsuit that accused the platform and its Chinese parent ByteDance of endangering children and misleading consumers about its safety.

The agreement, announced Friday just days before a scheduled trial, requires TikTok to introduce a two-hour daily limit for Alabama teenagers, add pauses after 15 minutes of use and strengthen age-verification measures. The state’s payment could rise to $300 million if 40 other attorneys general reach similar agreements with TikTok within a specified period.

“This builds on our commitment and core objective to continually enhance our robust safety tools to protect teens,” a TikTok US spokesperson said.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall called the agreement “a great day for Alabama parents.” The case had been due to go to trial on Monday in Montgomery state court, where proceedings were expected to last two to three weeks and could have provided an unusually detailed examination of TikTok’s internal operations.

Alabama sued TikTok last year, alleging that its continuous stream of videos makes the platform highly addictive and that its recommendation system pushes young users toward increasingly intense material involving violence and self-harm. The state said this contributed to a teen mental-health crisis and caused emergency-room visits for self-harm to “skyrocket.”

The lawsuit also accused TikTok of falsely claiming to restrict young users’ access to sexual and violent content so that its app could receive safe-for-teen ratings in the Google, Apple and Microsoft app stores. It further alleged that the company misled users about Chinese government access to US data.

Alabama said users can evade TikTok’s age questions by watching videos without creating accounts, allowing the company to continue collecting viewing data. The state argued that the lack of effective age controls rendered features such as “Kids Mode” largely useless and allowed children to become trapped in “filter bubbles” containing increasingly intense content.

TikTok has maintained that teen safety is a key priority in its platform design and has argued that Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act protects online services from liability over user-generated content.

The Alabama settlement marks TikTok’s first such agreement with a US state in the broader litigation over social media and youth well-being. At least 27 other states and Washington, D.C., have filed similar lawsuits. TikTok also faces thousands of claims from individuals, school districts and municipalities over alleged harm to young users. Meta Platforms, Snap and Alphabet’s YouTube are defendants in many of those cases.

With the Alabama settlement, TikTok has now resolved all of the cases against it that had been selected for trial, including claims brought by five young people and a Kentucky school district.

The deal also contains provisions that could impose additional restrictions if rivals Snap, Google and Meta adopt comparable measures. Those changes could further limit teenagers’ time on social media and restrict overnight access.

Last month, Meta agreed to a $17.1 billion settlement with 47 states, Washington, D.C., and US territories. Meta did not admit wrongdoing and agreed to change how teenagers access Instagram and Facebook. The agreement conditioned $5 billion of the payout on TikTok, Snap and YouTube adopting those terms; TikTok has not publicly commented on that arrangement.

The Alabama agreement comes as platforms face growing pressure over youth safety, while the state-level nature of the settlement could make nationwide implementation of major changes difficult.

By Tamilla Hasanova