TikTok gave teens a fake 'reset my feed' button, New York says

TikTok has a feature called Algo Refresh. You press it, your For You feed supposedly resets, and the app stops serving whatever rabbit hole you fell into. According to newly unsealed filings in New York's lawsuit against the company, some of the people who pressed it got a placebo.

The filings, part of Attorney General Letitia James's case, describe what the state calls "ghost" experiments. TikTok picked thousands of users who had opted into Algo Refresh, teens and children among them. They got a message saying the reset had worked. Their feeds kept showing the same kind of videos. A control group got the real version, and TikTok compared the two groups on time spent in the app and on ad revenue.

Somebody inside saw the problem

A product manager on TikTok's Digital Well Being team objected in an internal chat, writing that "This feature is about algorithm transparency and control," and adding: "A placebo group completely conflicts with that."

TikTok says it routinely tests features in real-world conditions, and that New York misdescribes how Algo Refresh works. It has denied the state's claims in court. Reuters first reported the allegations on October 7. New York's suit is one of more than two dozen state cases accusing the company of designing its app to hook kids.

A/B testing is how every app gets built. Quietly disconnecting a safety switch for children and then measuring how much longer they scroll is a different kind of experiment, and most parents would have wanted to sign a permission slip.

Sources: TechCrunch, The Next Web.