Two US senators have written to TikTok about an experiment that switched off a safety feature for roughly 15 million American users. Their letter runs to four pages and sets out 13 questions. It gives the company until 1 September to reply. The senators call the decision to run the test “depraved”.
Republican Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal sent it on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported. It is addressed to TikTok chief executive Shou Chew and to Adam Presser, who runs the company’s US spinoff. The pair co-authored the Kids Online Safety Act. That makes this a demand from the people drafting the law meant to govern the company.
What the senators are asking for
The questions are specific. The senators want the names of every employee who was told about the experiment. They want an explanation of why the company allowed minors into the test. They want to know when executives learned of it. They also want a “complete, unredacted version” of the internal document describing it.
One request reaches far beyond this one safety experiment. The pair asked for a list of every algorithmic experiment TikTok has run in the United States where it “withheld, disabled, delayed, or reduced a safety feature”. They want the number of users caught in each one. They also want to know how many of those were minors.
