Politics

The DOJ Settled TikTok’s Child Privacy Case for Less Than Half What TikTok Offered

By Mike Harper · May 18, 2026

In 2024, TikTok was apparently prepared to pay $1 billion to resolve the federal government’s child privacy lawsuit. The Trump Justice Department agreed to $400 million instead. And the money, according to sources familiar with the negotiations, is not going to the families whose children’s data was collected without consent — it is going to fund President Trump’s Washington beautification projects.

The Trump administration is nearing a $400 million settlement with TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance to resolve an ongoing lawsuit filed by the Biden-era DOJ and supported by the Federal Trade Commission. The lawsuit alleged TikTok knowingly allowed children under 13 to create accounts on the regular platform — not the COPPA-compliant TikTok Kids mode — and then collected their personal information, location data, biometric identifiers, and behavioral data without obtaining parental consent, in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

The conduct was documented over years of internal communications and regulatory investigations. TikTok had already been fined $5.7 million in 2019 by the FTC under a prior administration for COPPA violations and had committed to compliance as part of that resolution. The new lawsuit alleged the violations continued and expanded after that commitment.

The gap between the original willingness to pay and the final settlement figure is not unusual in regulatory negotiations — defendants typically open lower and prosecutors open higher, and they meet somewhere in between. What is unusual is the characterization of where the money goes. Sources familiar with the discussions told ABC News that settlement monies would be used to fund Trump’s “beautification” projects in Washington — a reference to the administration’s broader initiative to beautify federal buildings, parks, and public spaces in the capital.

Consumer advocates are calling the arrangement a sweetheart deal. The argument is twofold: first, that $400 million is inadequate accountability for a company with $80 billion in annual global revenue that allegedly violated children’s privacy at scale for years after promising to stop; second, that directing the proceeds to executive beautification projects rather than to affected families or a consumer protection fund removes the only direct remediation available to the children whose data was taken.

TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance finalized a deal in January to establish a majority American-owned joint venture to secure US operations — a structure the Trump administration conditionally approved to prevent TikTok’s forced divestiture under the law Congress passed last year. The timing of the settlement, coming shortly after that operational resolution, has raised questions among lawmakers about whether the two negotiations influenced each other.

For parents of children who use TikTok — and with more than 170 million US users, that is a significant portion of American households — the settlement provides no direct recourse or compensation. COPPA enforcement actions do not typically create individual plaintiff rights. The $400 million goes to the government. The children whose data was collected receive nothing directly.

The settlement has not been formally announced or filed in court as of Monday morning. Its terms may change before finalization.