TikTok and its parent company ByteDance have agreed to pay $400 million to settle allegations by the US Department of Justice that the short-form video platform illegally collected personal data from children under the age of 13, in one of the largest child privacy settlements in American history.
The lawsuit, filed in 2024 under the Biden administration, accused TikTok and ByteDance of violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal law enacted in 2000 that requires online services targeting children to obtain parental consent before collecting their personal information. Prosecutors alleged the platform gathered "vast amounts of data" on millions of underage users without such consent. Under the terms of the settlement, TikTok will pay $300 million immediately, with a further $100 million due once a prior consent decree — issued in 2019 against TikTok's predecessor app, Musical.ly — is formally vacated. Musical.ly had previously paid a $5.7 million fine for similar COPPA violations after regulators found it had knowingly collected children's names, email addresses, and other data without parental approval.
The settlement arrives amid significant structural changes to TikTok's US operations. Following pressure from both the Biden and Trump administrations over national security concerns related to the app's Chinese ownership, ByteDance agreed earlier this year to establish a majority American-owned joint venture, with US investors now holding an 81% stake and ByteDance retaining 19%. The Justice Department noted these changes — including new ownership arrangements, management structures, and improved privacy practices — as a factor in resolving the case without prolonged litigation. TikTok has also introduced mandatory date-of-birth entry for all users and developed automated age-moderation systems to identify and remove accounts belonging to children who misrepresented their age, with hundreds of trained staff dedicated to underage account moderation.
The scale of the penalty places it among the most significant ever imposed for COPPA violations. For comparison, Google's YouTube paid $170 million in 2019, and video game company Epic Games paid $275 million in 2022 for similar breaches. Meanwhile, Meta — the owner of Instagram and Facebook — faces a separate jury trial this week brought by attorneys general from 29 US states, with potential penalties that could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The settlement underscores growing regulatory pressure on major technology platforms over child safety online. "Children and parents are better protected today than they were when this case began," said Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate. For TikTok, the deal draws a legal line under years of scrutiny while allowing the platform, used by more than 200 million Americans, to operate with greater regulatory certainty. TikTok did not offer any public comment on the agreement.