New York Attorney General Letitia James is trying to use newly unsealed allegations against TikTok to bolster her argument in favor of imposing more age verification digital ID checks on the app.
The alleged conduct of one of the world’s most popular social media app deserves scrutiny on its own terms. But James is using it to push for a solution that would affect all users, not just those the app is accused of deceiving.
Namely, the remedy the attorney general seeks is more age-gating, which means checking everyone’s age.
This is not the first time James has targeted TikTok, and this is not the first time she has sought to use the courts to impose more age verification on the platform.
In 2024, James sued TikTok alleging it “misrepresents the safety of the platform.” One of the alternative designs James said the company should have adopted was “Designing more effective age-gating mechanisms.”
At the time, James said, “TikTok claims that their platform is safe for young people, but that is far from true.”
In September 2025, we reported that James had come up with draft rules under the SAFE for Kids Act, which would require platforms to verify users’ ages before giving them algorithmic feeds. One of the accepted methods of doing this is facial age estimation.
The newly unsealed parts of the complaint, originally filed on August 31, detail what James refers to as “ghost” or placebo experiments conducted by TikTok. One of them was “Algo Refresh,” a tool meant to reset recommendations for users trying to escape unwanted or harmful content. The “safety feature” was available to all users, including teens and children, but the complaint alleges that some of them were given a non-functional version of it.
Users who turned it on believed they had switched it on; their feeds did not change.
The complaint further alleges that the placebo tests ran from February until May 2023, affecting more than 28,000 users, and covered “at least one other safety feature.” The goal, the filing said, was to measure time spent on the app and ad revenue.
One of the “experiments” was described by a TikTok product manager for Digital Well Being as: “This feature is about algorithm transparency and control.” They added: “A placebo group completely conflicts with that.”
The New York Attorney General is not interested in this kind of transparency and control – instead, she is after more age verification.
TikTok responded to the new allegations by saying they “mischaracterize” how Algo Refresh works. A spokesperson added, “We continuously make improvements to our platform which means that, like most companies, we regularly test new products and features to validate the experience and understand how they work in the real world.”
The complaint also mentions “backtest” experiments that allegedly went on from early 2022 until at least April 2023, during which safety features were withheld from more than 10 million randomly chosen users. This was first reported by Bloomberg in August.
In other words, the answer to allegations that TikTok lied about providing safety features to its users is to make sure every New Yorker is age-verified.
