A Senate showdown is brewing over a TikTok experiment that stripped a safety feature from roughly 15 million U.S. users in early 2022 — including a 16-year-old from Bayport, New York, who died by suicide within a month of being placed in the test group. Senators Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut have sent TikTok executives a letter demanding answers, calling the company's decision to run the test on minors “depraved.”
Chase Nasca was randomly selected on January 25, 2022, for an algorithm experiment that turned off a filter-bubble prevention safeguard for 10% of U.S. users, according to reporting from Bloomberg Businessweek's Olivia Carville, as detailed by the Los Angeles Times. That safeguard was designed to break up online echo chambers of harmful content before they could take hold on a user's feed. Nasca died the following month, and internal company records later confirmed the safety strategy never activated on his account — by design, because he had landed in the control group.
Blackburn and Blumenthal, who co-authored the Kids Online Safety Act, are demanding a list of every U.S. algorithmic experiment that withheld, disabled, delayed or reduced a safety feature, along with the number of users and minors involved. They also want the names of every employee who knew about the test, details on when TikTok executives learned of it, and an unredacted copy of the confidential 2023 company document that first surfaced the experiment. In total, the senators posed 13 questions and gave TikTok until September 1 to respond.
A Feed Full of Warning Signs
Court filings from a wrongful death lawsuit filed in March 2023 by the Social Media Victims Law Center disclosed that Nasca had no history of depression and mostly searched TikTok for things like bench press tips and anime. Instead, the platform's recommendation algorithm pushed more than 1,000 unsolicited videos about self-harm and suicide onto his For You feed, with his account eventually flooded by thousands of videos touching on sadness, hopelessness, loneliness and suicide, per the lawsuit's findings.
The scope of the experiment was vast. TikTok's control group — retaining an older software model that lacked echo-chamber disruption features while the company measured engagement — spanned an estimated 15 million people nationwide, according to reporting cited by TNW. Blackburn said in the senators' letter that TikTok “knowingly used its users as an experiment,” arguing the company prioritized making money and capturing eyeballs over user safety while it balanced trust-and-safety goals against measuring daily active users and other core metrics.
Congress Was Warned Years Earlier
This isn't the first time Nasca's case has reached Capitol Hill. During a March 2023 congressional hearing, Florida Representative Gus Bilirakis confronted TikTok CEO Shou Chew directly with Nasca's story, telling him the platform's technology was “literally leading to death” while Nasca's parents watched from the hearing room, according to Caplin News. Chew responded at the time that TikTok takes these issues very seriously. Bilirakis later said the report on the safety experiment demonstrated the devastating consequences of prioritizing engagement metrics and corporate profits over child safety, and he has championed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act in response.
A TikTok spokesperson said the company remains deeply committed to the safety and well-being of its users, especially teens, and pointed to its trust-and-safety investments, including detection systems and dedicated enforcement teams that remove content violating community guidelines and mental health resources for users who search for suicide-related content. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment about the senators' letter itself, per the Los Angeles Times report. Adam Presser, CEO of TikTok's Culver City-based U.S. spinoff, was also named as a recipient of the senators' letter alongside Chew.
Legislative Gridlock Over Duty of Care
The revelations land amid a stalled federal push for online child safety rules. The Kids Online Safety Act, which would force platforms to prioritize child safety above profit and require companies to exercise reasonable care against mental health harms like anxiety, depression and compulsive usage among minors, died in the House in 2024 before being reintroduced this year. On August 5, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation voted to advance the revived KOSA alongside legislation regulating AI chatbots and connected toys, according to the IAPP.
The House, however, passed its own Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act in June after stripping out the Senate's duty-of-care mandate over First Amendment censorship concerns. That House bill still incorporates most of the Senate's original child-safety proposal and adds rules covering AI chatbots and video games, but without the stronger duty-of-care standard. Blackburn and Bilirakis have both called for child safety bills to be fast-tracked through Congress.
A Legal Landscape Shifting Beneath TikTok
TikTok has so far leaned on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to shield its algorithmic curation from liability — a defense a New York Supreme Court judge accepted in April 2025 when dismissing the Nasca family's wrongful death lawsuit, a ruling now under appeal. But that legal shield is facing new pressure elsewhere. In February, a San Jose judge rejected TikTok's Section 230 defense in a separate case over addictive app design, and in August a New Mexico state court fined Meta more than $500 million under a public nuisance theory for teen mental health harms — a decision that could offer a new template for holding platforms liable for design choices.
States have increasingly taken the lead while Congress stalls. Pennsylvania sued TikTok this month over minor safety violations following a statewide student investigation, joining a coalition of 14 state attorneys general who filed suit against the platform in October 2024 over addictive design features, Hoodline previously reported. Florida's attorney general filed a similar suit over minors' safety in June, and parents rallied in Washington in April alongside Blackburn and Blumenthal in support of KOSA. Investigative reporting in May found that more than a year after Nasca's death, his still-active TikTok account continued to be automatically served videos promoting self-harm and suicide.
