TikTok has agreed to pay $300 million—plus another $100 million at a later date—to the United States government. Per Variety, the payout became public today as a settlement in a lawsuit originally launched against the social media company by the Department Of Justice under the Biden administration, alleging that it had acted in violation of the United States’ Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
Specifically, the lawsuit asserted that, by allowing its young users to sign up for TikTok accounts while under the age of 13 without parental supervision, TikTok allowed those kids to opt in to sharing all sorts of data about themselves without legally mandated parental oversight. (The suit also noted that, what with TikTok being a social media service, it also allowed those kids to communicate and interact with adult users with very few safeguards in place.) That’s in what was allegedly—because the government settlement today involved TikTok taking no legal responsibility for any of this—pretty clear violation of COPPA, which went into effect way back in 2001, and is specifically designed to get in the way of pre-teens spilling their digital guts to companies and advertisers before they’re too young to understand what they’re doing.
Interestingly, it’s not clear, from the current DOJ’s statement on the case, who, exactly, will be providing the settlement fee, which has been broken into two chunks: $300 million now, and another $100 million once the government vacates a previous order against TikTok’s predecessor, Musical.ly. TikTok did, after all, get chopped and screwed pretty heavily over the last few years, with the Trump White House ultimately midwifing a sale back in early 2026 of Chinese company ByteDance’s U.S.-based operations to a crew of investors not based out of the rival superpower; the government’s press information about the case called it a “settlement with TikTok, ByteDance, and affiliated entities (TikTok),” which makes it a little murky which of those companies will be pouring this pretty massive influx of cash into the government’s coffers.
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