TikTok on Friday reached a $400 million settlement in a lawsuit brought by the Justice Department that accused the company of illegally gathering children’s information.
The 2024 suit, filed under the Biden administration, claimed that TikTok had gathered data from users under the age of 13 without parental permission. The suit accused TikTok of knowingly allowing children to create accounts and of failing to honor parents’ requests to delete their children’s accounts.
TikTok violated federal privacy law along with a 2019 agreement with the government in which the app promised to take steps to protect children’s privacy, according to the government.
Under the settlement announced Friday, TikTok will pay $300 million. The Justice Department also asked the court to eliminate the 2019 agreement, after which TikTok would pay the government an additional $100 million, according to a Justice Department news release.
The settlement is the latest by the Trump administration as it takes a softer approach toward ongoing government litigation against several major companies.
In March, the Justice Department settled a lawsuit that accused Live Nation, the owner of Ticketmaster, of illegally maintaining a monopoly. The government also reached a settlement last year that allowed the technology company Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy a rival, Juniper Networks, over the objection of some state attorneys general.
The settlement between TikTok and the government also marks the latest win for the popular short-video app under the second Trump administration.
During President Trump’s first term, he signed an executive order to force its Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell it. . But TikTok successfully sued to block that ban. In 2024 former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed a law that would ban the app unless it was sold to a non-Chinese owner.
After Mr. Trump returned to office, he repeatedly delayed enforcement of that law. In January, ByteDance announced that it had reached a deal, hammered out with the United States government, that spun off its U.S. operations to a group of non-Chinese investors.
Stanley E. Woodward Jr., an associate attorney general, called the settlement “a major victory for American children and parents” in a statement. A spokeswoman for the U.S. version of TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
- Credits: The New York Times
- Author: David McCabe
- Photo: Anna Barclay
