TikTok Employees Know Just How Dangerous the App Is

Art by Visuals via Unsplash

By India McCarty

A newly unsealed video shares TikTok employees’ concerns about the addictive qualities of the app, especially when it comes to young users. 

“Unfortunately, some of the stuff that people find interesting are not always the most healthy,” Nicholas Chng, who worked on risk detection at TikTok before he left last year, said in the video. “We do, in a way, encourage some of this content being put up just because of the way the platform is designed. And sometimes I worry about that.”

Brett Peters, TikTok’s current global head of creator advocacy and reputation, was also featured in the video, admitting that the app’s main goal is to get “people to be on the app longer.”

“Literally, that’s like why we’re all here is to help continue to diversify the content ecosystem, to make TikTok a place where you can get so much different types of content that you never want to leave,” he explained.

Related: Why 14 States Are Suing TikTok

Ashlen Sepulveda, who worked in trust and safety before leaving TikTok in 2021, singled out the app’s tendency to push “disordered eating behavior” content to young people, saying, “It keeps me up at night.”

“The more that a user looks up things about, like fitness or like diet, it turns into losing weight, and then, soon enough, the entire feed of this user is like soft disordered eating behavior that is being discussed by their peers with no opportunity to remove themselves from that,” she explained.

The video was evidence in part of a North Carolina lawsuit filed last year, alleging TikTok misled users about the safety of the app. On Tuesday, North Carolina Special Superior Court Judge Adam Conrad ordered that the video and suit be unsealed. He also denied a motion filed by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance asking that the suit be dismissed. 

“These clips clearly show that social media companies know they’re designing their apps to hook our children even at the expense of their health,” North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson said in a statement to CBS News. “That’s why the company fought so hard to keep the video out of the public eye.”

However, a TikTok spokesperson claims the video is a “shameful attempt to distort an open internal conversation about making the platform safer when TikTok was just beginning five years ago.”

“This manipulation relies on conversations taken out of context with the sole purpose of misleading the public and grandstanding,” the spokesperson continued. 

The newly unsealed video proves that TikTok’s employees are aware of the real dangers the app poses to young viewers, no matter what the company’s public statements claim. 

Read Next: How TikTok’s Algorithms Show Users Potentially Harmful Content

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