New York is among more than a dozen states suing TikTok over harm to young users' mental health and claims it misled the public about safety. (Reuters pic)

NEW YORK: New York attorney general Letitia James has added new allegations to a child safety lawsuit against TikTok, accusing the platform of running secret experiments on teen users.

The new claims are attributed to a Bloomberg Businessweek report, based on a confidential TikTok document, about an algorithmic test the company began in 2021 that impacted about 15 million US users, including one teen who died by suicide.

For the experiment, TikTok withheld a new safety feature from 10% of US users in order to test whether the change reduced user time on the platform.