TikTok has reached an agreement with the Trump administration and will pay 400 million dollars as a penalty for violating federal laws that protect children's privacy. 300 million of these dollars are to be paid immediately, and another 100 will be disbursed once a court order overturns a previous consent decree against its predecessor company, Musical.ly.
"This agreement is a great victory for American children and parents", said Deputy Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. in a statement. "The Department's priority is to ensure that minors are protected online and that the companies entrusted with their personal information comply with their legal obligations," added the official, celebrating this resolution.
Since the United States sued TikTok at the end of 2024, the U.S. subsidiary of the platform is no longer in Chinese hands and, in January of this year, signed agreements with major American investors such as Oracle, Silver Lake, and the Emirati investment firm MGX to form a new joint venture.
TikTok and the Trump administration reached a multimillion-dollar agreement this week
It is that TikTok and its parent company based in China, ByteDance, violated a federal law that requires applications and websites aimed at minors to obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from children under 13 years old. The platform also failed to comply with requests from parents who wanted their children's accounts deleted, and even chose not to delete them.
TikTok is not the only social network facing lawsuits in court for violating child safety and privacy. Instagram's parent company, Meta Platforms, owned by Mark Zuckerberg, is currently on trial in a federal court in Oakland, California, for allegations of violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998, along with several state statutes.
