Lawyers for the US government said more than 170 million teenagers were using TikTok and that the app “targeted children”, yet failed to effectively verify users’ ages or obtain parental consent for use by minors.

It is one of the largest settlements of its kind ever reached, the BBC reports.

Under the terms of the deal, TikTok and its parent company ByteDance will pay the US Department of Justice $300m immediately, with a further $100m due once the US government lifts a 2019 consent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed in 2024 by the Department of Justice under former US President Joe Biden, which alleged that TikTok and ByteDance had collected “vast amounts of data” on millions of users under the age of 13.

That practice violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a US federal law enacted in 2000. It is the same law under which dozens of US states have now filed lawsuits against Meta.

Other companies fined by the US government for COPPA violations include Google’s YouTube, which paid $170m in 2019, and Epic Games, which paid $275m in 2022.

Meta now also faces fines that could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, over COPPA violations alleged by attorneys general in 29 US states. The jury trial in that case began this week, with the owner of Instagram and Facebook accused of targeting child users and profiting from them.

While the lawsuit against TikTok predates last year’s split of its US operations from its original Chinese ownership, the settlement applies only to TikTok’s activities in China.

ByteDance was recently valued by investors at $550bn.