The Department of Justice on Friday announced it had reached a $400 million settlement with social media platform TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance over concerns about children’s safety on the platform.
The litigation relates to a complaint filed by the DOJ in 2024 that accused TikTok and its affiliated entities of violating children’s privacy by illegally gathering their information through the app.
Under the settlement, TikTok will immediately pay $300 million to the federal government to resolve the dispute over its compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which places restrictions on online services collecting personal information from children under 13. Another $100 million will be paid after a federal court vacates a previous decree involving Musical.ly, TikTok’s predecessor.
“The Department’s priority is ensuring that children are protected online and that companies entrusted with their personal information meet their legal obligations,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said. “This resolution secures a substantial recovery while reinforcing the protections that families expect and deserve.”
The dispute has a long history. Musical.ly agreed in 2019 to pay $5.7 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that it illegally collected information from children younger than 13. The resulting court order imposed requirements intended to ensure the company complied with children’s privacy laws going forward.
But federal officials alleged those problems continued after Musical.ly became TikTok.
The DOJ, acting on a referral from the FTC, sued TikTok and ByteDance in August 2024. The government alleged TikTok knowingly allowed millions of children under 13 to create accounts outside its more restrictive children’s experience and collected personal information from them without notifying or obtaining consent from their parents.
The DOJ said on Friday that TikTok “has undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions, and privacy practices.
“The company has implemented extensive measures designed to strengthen safeguards for younger users, improve age-related controls, and enhance parental oversight,” the department said in a press release. “Those developments have materially advanced the public interests underlying the Department’s litigation and have strengthened protections for millions of American families.”
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The settlement resolves one major piece of the government’s yearslong scrutiny of TikTok. The company separately faced national security concerns over ByteDance’s ties to China, which prompted Congress in 2024 to enact a law requiring the company to divest its U.S. operations or face a nationwide ban.
ByteDance reached a deal earlier this year establishing a majority American-owned venture overseeing TikTok’s U.S. operations, resolving the immediate threat that the platform could be shut down in the United States.