TikTok's safety chief disputes claims during Denver visit

During a visit to Denver on Thursday, TikTok’s U.S. head of safety disputed claims made in a multi-state lawsuit that the video-based platform is harming young users.

TikTok's Head of Trust and Safety Suzy Loftus told The Denver Gazette teen safety claims made against TikTok are “inaccurate” and “misleading.”

"We're disappointed that they filed a lawsuit," Loftus said. "Our focus continues to be the voluntary efforts we're making to build a safe platform for teens, family pairing, default time limits, really aggressively identifying and removing any accounts for anyone who is under 13.”

TikTok's safety chief didn’t specify what claims in the lawsuit were misleading or inaccurate when asked by The Denver Gazette.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Tuesday helped lead a coalition of 22 state attorneys general to follow up on whether TikTok is violating state consumer protection laws, according to a news release. Last year, 46 states filed a similar amicus brief, Weiser added.

Essentially, the states accuse TikTok of providing addictive software designed to keep young users engaged as long as possible. The lawsuit also claims TikTok misrepresented its content moderation effectiveness.

The multistate coalition on Tuesday filed an amicus brief to Tennessee courts, urging them to enforce TikTok’s compliance with a court order to produce safety records and protocols surrounding teen safety on its platform. TikTok has twice failed to provide records when requested by Tennessee courts, according to Weiser’s office.

“TikTok’s disregard for compliance with reasonable information requests despite court orders and destruction of relevant documents sets a dangerous precedent,” Weiser said in a statement. “This enforcement action is a crucial step in holding TikTok accountable.”

The amicus brief said: “The multistate group has good reason to believe that TikTok is violating state consumer protection laws in ways that have fueled the ongoing crisis in the mental health of children and teens.”

Loftus, two days after Weiser’s coalition launched, led an information roundtable in Denver’s River North (RiNo) neighborhood. She was joined by fellow TikTok representatives and local content creators in lauding TikTok’s small business success and improved teen safety on its platform.

“TikTok continues to be an inclusive place that we're addressing ongoing mental health issues,” Loftus said. “We've built a product by design that is focused on recognizing teens are different than adults, and our platform is much more restrictive for teens than it is for adults.”

TikTok's Colorado visit was part of a multi-state tour to share its mental health safety efforts for young users.

Loftus said TikTok invested $2 billion this year to address online safety, especially for young users. TikTok’s teen safety protocols target those between ages 13 and 18. Protocols include defaults to 60-minute daily screen times for users under 18, video comment restrictions, family pairing features, content mitigation efforts and no push notifications at night, according to TikTok officials. The platform also disables direct messaging for users under 16.

“The things that are in our control are the things that we're focused on,” Loftus said.

The social media company said that approximately 97,000 businesses and 2.1 million people use TikTok throughout Colorado. TikTok representatives also said the average age of users is 30.

Loftus said TikTok is also taking an approach to mitigate "dangerous" content.

“Part of that thing you want to do with the teen brain is just get them to pause for a moment and think about what they're doing before they share it," she said on content management. "And so this is one of the steps that we've taken, not only to remove the content, but empower our users with resources and information.”

The attorney general lawsuit comes as congress is forcing TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform and release the data of 170 million American users before Jan. 19 to avoid a U.S. ban.

The law forces the two companies to break ties by mid-January or lose one of their biggest markets in the world.

A bill, signed by President Joe Biden in April, was the culmination of a years-long saga in Washington over the short-form video-sharing app, which the government sees as a national security threat due to its connections to China.

The U.S. has said it's concerned about TikTok collecting vast swaths of user data, including sensitive information on viewing habits , that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Officials have also warned the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect.

Some countries have full bans on TikTok, including Afghanistan, India, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal and Somalia, according to techtarget.com.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.