TikTok disabled algorithm safety for 15 million users in 2022 – teen died after suicide content flood

Full text

TL;DR

A leaked internal report reveals TikTok withheld algorithm safety features from ~15 million people in 2022 to test how guardrails impacted daily active user (DAU) metrics.

The report notes that a 16-year-old was randomly placed in the unprotected control group, flooding his feed with thousands of suicide and self-harm videos shortly before his death.

TikTok says user safety remains a top priority, and it continues to invest in Trust and Safety.

TikTok is certainly no stranger to controversy. Earlier this year, alarming shifts in TikTok’s privacy policy had many of us weighing whether it was finally time to hit delete on our accounts . Yet, as anyone who has searched for a decent TikTok alternative knows, finding a platform that recreates its hyper-personalized magic is far easier said than done. Now, a devastating revelation regarding how the app handles user safety might force even the most dedicated scrollers to think twice about their continued presence on the platform.

According to a confidential internal report obtained by Bloomberg , when TikTok updated its algorithm in 2021 to stop users from getting overwhelmed by harmful content, the company intentionally withheld the fix from millions of users. To measure how safety features might impact app stickiness and daily active user (DAU) metrics, TikTok conducted a massive A/B experiment. By design, a control group comprising 10% of US users — about 15 million people — kept the old, unprotected version of the algorithm.