Anthropic Bans Cruel Treatment of Claude AI
October 10, 2026
New York’s unsealed lawsuit alleges TikTok ran placebo experiments on thousands of children and teens, giving them non-functional safety features while studying ad revenue impact.
A disturbing picture of how TikTok treats child safety as an experiment rather than a commitment has emerged from a newly unsealed lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James. According to the allegations now made public, TikTok ran so-called “ghost” or placebo experiments on thousands of users, including children and teenagers, who believed they had activated safety features on the platform — when in fact the features had been deliberately disabled for them.
The experiments centred on “Algo Refresh,” a tool designed to reset TikTok’s recommendation algorithm for users seeking to escape unwanted or potentially harmful content. According to New York’s lawsuit, TikTok randomly assigned some users a working version of the feature while secretly giving others a non-functional version, all without their knowledge or consent. Users in the placebo group believed they had taken control of their feeds. They had not.
The lawsuit, originally filed in 2024 and updated in August 2026 before being unsealed by a court order, is one of more than two dozen brought by US states accusing TikTok of designing its platform to addict children and of misleading users about safety measures.
The internal record is particularly damning. A product manager for Digital Wellbeing at TikTok flagged the placebo testing as problematic at the time, writing in an internal message: “This feature is about algorithm transparency and control. A placebo group completely conflicts with that.” Despite that warning, the company reportedly conducted the tests repeatedly on thousands of users in 2023, with the explicit goal of studying how long users remained on the platform and measuring the impact on ad revenue.
The unsealed portions of the lawsuit also reference a separate set of experiments, previously reported by Bloomberg, in which TikTok randomly disabled safety features that limited exposure to harmful content for selected users. A teenage boy in New York who was placed in one of these tests subsequently died by suicide after being shown what internal reviews described as an “onslaught” of content about self-harm and suicide.
TikTok denied the core allegations. A spokesperson said the company “continuously makes improvements to our platform” and regularly tests features to understand how they work in the real world, while maintaining that keeping young users safe is a priority. The company has broadly denied New York’s claims in court filings.
In September, TikTok settled the first state lawsuit set for trial, agreeing to pay Alabama up to $300 million and change how its platform functions for teen users in the state. With New York’s expanded complaint now unsealed, the legal and reputational pressure on the platform is set to intensify significantly.
