Teen died because TikTok just turned off safety controls to see what happened

TikTok boasted about adding measures to protect teenagers from harmful content, but deliberately kept them from 15 million Americans until one killed himself, and then lied about being responsible.


Even before the US questioned the security of Chinese social media platform TikTok, the service's parent company was regularly under fire over about damaging teenage mental health, .

All of which would be why TikTok made a show in 2021 of introducing new safeguards to protect users from harmful content. Yet to find out whether these measures actually worked, TikTok decided it was worth risking 15 million American users.