Nearly two years after TikTok faced a lawsuit under the Biden administration over child privacy concerns, the social media company has reached a $400 million settlement in the U.S.
TikTok and its parent company ByteDance were first hit with the lawsuit in August 2024 by the Justice Department. The social media company was accused of illegally collecting children’s data by both knowingly allowing children to create accounts on the platform and failing to delete said accounts at parents’ request.
According to the New York Times, TikTok faces a $300 million settlement over the case, with an additional $100 million owed after the Justice Department asked the court to override a 2019 agreement made when TikTok agreed to address the privacy concerns.
This is the latest update in an epic legal saga surrounding TikTok and various concerns over addiction and privacy. In January, the social media service settled a a lawsuit, which claimed that the platform sought to deliberately addict and harm children, just days before going to trial. Terms of the settlement in the addiction lawsuit were not disclosed.
Also in January, ByteDance finalized a deal to create a majority American venture to manage data coming from the app’s U.S. clients so the social media service could remain active in the country. This came after a temporary shutdown in the U.S. in January of 2025 during the Biden administration and a series of delays made by the Trump administration to avoid similar outages.
In March, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration was set to pocket a $10 billion fee for brokering the deal that kept TikTok in service.
But the trouble will continue from there. On Aug. 10, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an attempt from Meta, TikTok, Google and Snap to immediately appeal a ruling regarding a litany of similar child addiction lawsuits. The companies will now have to face more than 3,000 such lawsuits filed by states, municipalities, school districts and individuals.
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