TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, reached on Friday a $400 million settlement with the United States Department of Justice over a lawsuit accusing the company of illegally collecting information from minors.
The lawsuit, filed in 2024, alleged that TikTok had collected data from users under 13 years old without their parents’ permission. It also accused the Chinese social network of knowingly allowing children to create accounts and of not honoring parents’ requests to delete their children’s accounts, as reported by The New York Times.
According to the Department of Justice, TikTok violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), as well as a 2019 agreement with the government in which the app committed to taking measures to protect children’s privacy.
The settlement reached this Friday is “one of the largest settlements ever obtained in a COPPA case”, according to a press release from the same department.
Under this agreement, the company will immediately pay $300 million and then another $100 million related to a 2019 Federal Trade Commission order involving Musical.ly, a video-sharing app that ByteDance bought in 2017 and merged with TikTok.
As CNN noted, this is the latest settlement amid a flood of lawsuits and scrutiny against major tech companies and social media platforms alleging harm to minors.
In March, the Department of Justice reached a settlement in a lawsuit accusing Live Nation, owner of Ticketmaster, of illegally maintaining a monopoly.
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Last year, meanwhile, the U.S. Executive also reached a deal allowing tech company Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy its rival, Juniper Networks, despite opposition from some state attorneys general.
The agreement between TikTok and the government also represents the latest victory for the popular short-video app under Donald Trump’s second administration, according to The New York Times.
During his first term, Trump signed an executive order to force the Chinese owner of the app to sell it. However, TikTok filed a lawsuit that managed to block that ban.
In 2024, former President Joe Biden enacted a law banning the social network unless it was sold to a non-Chinese owner. But, upon Trump’s return to the White House, he repeatedly delayed the implementation of that legislation.
It was earlier this year that ByteDance announced it had reached an agreement, mediated by the current U.S. government, under which it would share its operations with mostly American investors, such as Oracle and the private equity firm Silver Lake.
Stanley E. Woodward Jr., the Deputy Attorney General, called the agreement “a great victory for American children and parents”, in a statement released on social media.
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