In each of the separate lawsuits state regulators filed, dozens of internal communications, documents and research data were redacted — blacked-out from public view — since authorities entered into confidentiality agreements with TikTok.
But in one of the lawsuits, filed by the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, the redactions were faulty. This was revealed when Kentucky Public Radio copied-and-pasted excerpts of the redacted material, bringing to light some 30 pages of documents that had been kept secret.
If a drug was rolled out of clinical trials, and huge, huge portions of the people it was given to reported becoming addicted to it and also massive amounts of negative side effects, would you just say
…, well we don’t have a completely precise and thorough model of the causal mechanisms at the chemical and physiological level that perfectly describe how this drug is causing all these side effects…
Instead of, I don’t know, recalling the drug ASAP to minimize harm, maybe do the exact science of it later, in more ethical and controlled conditions?
TikTok obviously has an absurdly huge amount of data, a huge dataset, and they themselves have concluded that their product is addictive and that this very often results in deleterious effects with addictive use, and they’ve intentionally designed it that way.
This is more akin to ‘oil companies have known for decades that their industry causes global warming via their own studies and just decided to not release that information and instead spread confusion and doubt to the public when any other scientists start to figure out the same things they did with the same level of specificity’.
Again: These are TikTok’s own internal studies that they really, really, really did not want to be made public.