Reporting from NPR and Kentucky Public Radio illuminates a new discovery of court documents suggesting the higher-ups at TikTok were aware of the app's dangerous effects on teens.

This week, fourteen U.S. attorneys general sued TikTok, saying the app harms children's mental health. Much of the materials in those suits were redacted, but reporters can read some of that material by copy-pasting.

According to Kentucky's lawsuit, its research reveals that "compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.".

Finally, the case focuses on internal communication relating to a feature that allows parents to block their children's TikTok use -- apparently the feature only reduced usage by an average of 1.5 minutes per day, with the company instead measuring its success based on "improving public trust in the TikTok platform via media coverage.".

A TikTok spokesperson described it as "highly irresponsible" for NPR to publish excerpts from the lawsuit, which it described as having "cherry-picked misleading quotes" and taking "outdated documents out of context to misrepresent our commitment to community safety.".