LISTEN: Kentucky's TikTok lawsuit revealed executives knew about app’s effect on teens

Reporting from Kentucky Public Radio first detailed information that the Kentucky Attorney General's Office had tried to redact in court documents related to the state's lawsuit against TikTok.

Kentucky Public Radio Managing Editor Ryan Van Velzer sat down with Capitol Reporter Sylvia Goodman to discuss her reporting and what actions TikTok and the attorney general's office have taken since.

Van Velzer: It's been a whirlwind. What started out as daily reporting has turned into an international scoop. So start from the beginning. How did you find this story?

Goodman: Well, it actually started with the incredible Enterprise Capitol Reporter Joe Sonka. He pointed out this lawsuit to me and found out it would be filed in Scott County, which is a little bit unusual, but it didn't seem like this was going to be a huge story.

I mean, 13 other lawsuits were being filed in other states based on basically the same information, it seemed. So there wasn't a shortage of reporting already out there, but I started to read it, and I found the breadth of these redactions odd. And there are a few things I just try every time to get behind a redaction.

And to be completely honest, it was the very first one that worked: copy and paste. I copy and pasted it all out into a fresh document, and I could read all of those redactions.

Van Velzer: What did those redactions reveal?

Goodman: I mean, really, what didn't they reveal? We're talking pages and pages of redacted information, and I'll be honest, my jaw was on the floor reading some of this toward the top. The attorney general quotes one unnamed executive saying the algorithm could be depriving kids of some opportunities like, quote, sleep and eating, moving around the room and looking at someone in the eyes.

There's also evidence that TikTok knew how addictive their platform is. Internal studies found it could take as few as 260 videos to form a long lasting habit. Other documents show TikTok employees acknowledge a compulsive use of the app, as well as the negative consequences that can come from that.

So NPR received a statement from a TikTok spokesperson that said the company has robust safeguards, including proactively removing suspected underage users and safety features like default screen time limits.

Van Velzer: What can you tell me about what you found in the reporting about that?

Goodman : Yeah, and some of those safeguards are directly targeted in the lawsuit. It cites some internal documents that show TikTok did not, for example, want their screen time limits to actually lower screen time by very much at all, and they measured success of that tool by things like how much it improved public trust, rather than its reduction of screen time. And according to the court filing, an experiment on the screen time use prompts, which TikTok refers to publicly as a limit, the average time per day that teens spent on the platform went down from 108.5 minutes to about 107 minutes, that's a one and a half minute difference.

Van Velzer: And the lawsuit also targeted the app's content moderation, right?

Goodman: Yeah, it basically claimed that, based on TikTok documents, the moderation was not fully effective in flagging and actually removing content that violates its community guidelines. Another target was beauty filters that use artificial intelligence to rework someone's face. I think a lot of us are pretty familiar with these. Internal documents appear to show that TikTok was aware of the harmfulness of these filters.

The documents also revealed that the TikTok algorithm appears to actively prioritize beautiful people. The attorney general argued the documents show the company was trying to promote a narrow beauty norm that is harmful to young people. After we reported on some excerpts of the redacted information, the attorney general's office took action.

He filed a motion with the court to ask them to seal this document. I found this public document and reported on it before Coleman took that action, and I will continue to report on it. Coleman's motion says that the office has a confidentiality agreement with TikTok in their response to us, TikTok said NPR was, "highly irresponsible," to publish this information.