TikTok to Pay at Least $100 Million in Alabama Youth Addiction Settlement

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — TikTok has agreed to pay at least $100 million to settle Alabama’s lawsuit accusing it of intentionally designing its platform to foster compulsive use among children and teenagers. The amount could rise to $300 million if the company misses deadlines for court-enforceable product changes and child safety measures.

The agreement was finalized days before jury selection was due to begin in state court. It is the first state-level settlement resolving youth addiction claims against TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance.

For accounts held by minors, TikTok must set a default two-hour daily limit and give parents stronger controls to lower it. The company must also disable continuous, infinite-scrolling feeds for those users, restrict overnight access and push notifications, and prohibit appearance-altering beauty filters for young users. It must offer an alternative, non-personalized feed that does not use recommendation algorithms designed to maximize session length.

Alabama alleged that TikTok and ByteDance violated state consumer protection laws through deceptive design practices that exploited children’s underdeveloped impulse control to increase engagement and advertising revenue. The case is part of a wider series of regulatory and civil actions against major social media platforms. Meta Platforms Inc. previously agreed to an $18 billion settlement with 47 attorneys general over parallel claims that addictive features on Instagram and Facebook contributed to an adolescent mental health crisis.

TikTok still faces substantial legal exposure elsewhere. In 2024, a bipartisan coalition of more than a dozen state attorneys general filed individual and joint lawsuits alleging that the platform misled the public about its safety and designed recommendation algorithms to trap adolescents in compulsive viewing loops. Hundreds of municipal school districts and private plaintiffs have also brought claims, consolidated in federal multidistrict litigation targeting TikTok, Meta, Snap Inc. and Google’s YouTube.

The Alabama agreement follows a separate $400 million settlement TikTok reached with the U.S. Department of Justice in August over federal allegations that it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). That complaint accused the company of collecting, retaining and failing to delete the personal data of children under 13 without verifiable parental consent. At the time, federal regulators noted that TikTok had begun changes to its data governance and corporate oversight after establishing a dedicated U.S. corporate entity intended to put domestic operations under the supervision of non-Chinese investors.