TikTok, ByteDance and affiliated entities agreed on Friday to pay $400 million to settle litigation over compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the Justice Department announced. The 1998 law bars online services from collecting personal information from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent, and the department considers the figure to be one of the biggest recoveries ever secured in a COPPA case.

Under the settlement, $300 million is payable immediately. The remaining $100 million is contingent on a court entering an order vacating a prior consent decree against Musical.ly, the app ByteDance acquired in 2017 and folded into TikTok.

"This settlement is a major victory for American children and parents," said Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr.

The 2019 children's privacy order failed to prevent new violations

That earlier decree followed a $5.7 million penalty the Federal Trade Commission obtained in February 2019, which was at the time the largest civil penalty in a children's privacy case. The order required the company to obtain parental consent for users under 13 and to remove videos posted by those children. Children's-privacy enforcement has scaled up sharply since: Google paid $170 million over YouTube later in 2019, and Epic Games agreed to a $275 million COPPA penalty in 2022 over Fortnite — a benchmark the new $400 million settlement now exceeds.

The US Department of Justice and the FTC sued ByteDance in federal court in California in August 2024, alleging the company knowingly allowed children younger than 13 to sign up for regular accounts, where they could post content and interact with adults. The government said TikTok collected their personal data without informing their parents and ignored parental requests to delete that information.

The complaint further alleged that the company changed its registration process to make identifying underage users more difficult and retained data useful for targeted advertising despite objections from its own staff. Government lawyers said more than 170 million teenagers were on the platform.

DOJ points to TikTok's ownership and compliance changes

The department's statement leaned on what has changed since the lawsuit was filed. TikTok has undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions and privacy practices, it said, and has implemented measures strengthening safeguards for younger users, age controls and parental oversight. According to the release, those developments materially advanced the public interests behind the litigation.

The restructuring moved TikTok's US operations into a joint venture controlled by Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX, with ByteDance retaining a 19.9% stake. It grew out of a 2024 US law that required ByteDance to divest the app or face a nationwide ban.

The DOJ did not detail any conduct requirements beyond the payment and has not said what the money will be used for. Civil penalties in such cases ordinarily flow to the US Treasury. AFP reported that ABC News found in May that the administration was weighing directing settlement funds toward beautification projects, among them resurfacing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Senators want answers over a safety feature withheld from users

Separately, reports based on an internal document revealed that TikTok modified its algorithm in 2021 to ensure users would not be flooded repeatedly with the same harmful content — but withheld the update from 10% of its users in the United States, a control group of roughly 15 million people, to test whether the safer version reduced engagement.

Among those placed in the control group was Chase Nasca, a 16-year-old added in January 2022 who died by suicide the following month.

Senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal, co-authors of the Kids Online Safety Act, wrote to chief executive Shou Chew and US spinoff head Adam Presser on Wednesday, per Fortune, saying the company withheld a critical safety measure "in order to determine whether protecting users would impact its financial bottom-line."

The senators are seeking answers to 13 questions by September 1, among them the reason for leaving minors in the control group and a list of all US experiments in which a safety feature has been withheld. Their inquiry is one front in a broader push on child safety: KOSA passed the Senate 91–3 in July 2024 but stalled in the House, and the FTC has proposed the first major update to its COPPA rule since 2013, targeting how children's data is shared and retained.