TikTok employees raised concerns with company leaders about child exploitation, weak age protections and harmful content, according to depositions and internal records filed in federal court. The testimony also describes how TikTok earned revenue from virtual gifts sent during livestreams that violated its rules. The records, filed in March 2026 as part of litigation over alleged harm to young users, include testimony from staff who held senior safety and investigations roles. The cases against TikTok have not gone before a jury, and the depositions have not been presented as trial evidence. Reagen Maher, who worked in safety and investigations at TikTok from 2021 to 2024, testified that she spent months trying to get senior executives to address what she saw as serious risks. In an internal message quoted during her deposition, Maher wrote that she had been “fighting about fixing this for months” with people who did not consider the harms severe enough. Maher said she was concerned about sexual content involving minors, including children appearing in livestreams that viewers could reward with digital gifts. Those gifts can be converted into money, while TikTok receives a portion of livestream revenue, according to the testimony. An internal investigation cited in the court filings found that children ages 13 to 15 appeared in 112,000 TikTok Live videos during January 2022. The investigation identified risks including adults grooming children and the creation of child sexual abuse material. It also found TikTok received significant revenue from gifts sent to livestreams that breached platform rules. Silvija Krupena, a financial-crime specialist, said that if an adult used virtual gifts to pay a child for sexual acts during a livestream, the gifts could constitute payment for exploitation. Federal law can impose criminal liability on companies that knowingly benefit from child sex trafficking, while knowingly handling proceeds from child exploitation can raise money-laundering concerns. Those are legal risks, not findings that TikTok committed a crime. TikTok says it has an anti-money-laundering program consistent with international standards and industry practices. It did not answer questions about whether it reported all relevant videos to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, whether it closed accounts identified as paying for illegal content, or how it handled revenue connected to such material. The testimony also described gaps in age safeguards. Maher said users under 18 could reach an adults-only version of TikTok by signing up through Google, Facebook or Instagram, and that senior leaders knew of the loophole. TikTok did not respond to questions about it. A separate internal discussion revealed that TikTok staff worried a survey about users’ ages could draw scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission over whether children under 13 were on the platform. Adam Wang, TikTok’s head of Live at the time, testified that the survey avoided questions about users’ school level because answers indicating elementary-school attendance could raise issues under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Employees also flagged a hidden link that let teenagers disconnect parental accounts from TikTok’s Family Pairing controls. A product manager called the feature effectively pointless in an internal chat. TikTok says parents are notified when a minor unlinks an account. Former safety chief Eric Han testified about internal concerns that TikTok’s recommendation system could trap users in repeated streams of content, including material about suicide or body image. A 2020 internal report described a potential contagion effect around suicide-related content. Han said the platform did not warn parents about TikTok’s potential dangers. The disclosures come as TikTok and other social-media companies face hundreds of lawsuits alleging their products were designed in ways that harmed minors. TikTok agreed in May 2026 to pay $8 million to settle a Kentucky school district’s youth mental-health lawsuit and in September reached a $100 million settlement with Alabama over allegations involving addiction and harmful content. In a separate trial, a jury found Meta and YouTube liable for designing platforms to be addictive to young users. TikTok declined to provide a statement about the issues raised in the depositions, while pointing to previously published company policies. TikTok reported that 68% of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 used the platform in 2025, underscoring the scale of the safety questions for families and regulators.