European regulators on Friday accused TikTok of violating the Digital Services Act through the recommendation engine behind its For You feed. They said it can trap users in repetitive loops of videos about sadness, self-harm and body image. EU officials called it the first time they have directly challenged the engagement-driven recommendation system of a major social media platform.
Every time a user scrolls or likes a video on TikTok, the algorithm serves more of the same, leading users down rabbit holes they cannot easily escape from,
Henna Virkkunen, European Commission executive vice president
The European Commission's findings are preliminary. TikTok can examine the evidence and respond before a final decision. If the violations are confirmed, the company could be fined up to 6% of its annual global revenue, a figure neither TikTok nor its parent, ByteDance, discloses.
TikTok rejected the accusations, calling the Commission's statements fundamentally inaccurate. It said it has a strong record of protecting users and gives them direct control over what they watch.
The Commission wants the feed redesigned. Regulators said TikTok should weigh what users explicitly say they prefer, drop viewing time as a signal for recommending content, make its user controls easier to find and use, and test its algorithm regularly.
According to the Commission, the safeguards TikTok already offers fall short. Officials said its techniques for diversifying the feed do not work, refreshing the feed helps only for a short time, and the "not interested" button loses its effect after a while.
Officials stressed that the case is not about taking content down. Investigators deliberately examined videos that broke no laws and no TikTok rules, pointing to trends such as "what I eat in a day" and "SkinnyTok." Such clips may look harmless alone, officials said, but repeated exposure can harm young and vulnerable users.
Regulators said they reviewed TikTok's internal documents and data and studied roughly 20,000 videos with psychologists, psychiatrists and system design experts. They said TikTok had flagged some of these risks in its own assessments but failed to analyze them properly or put adequate safeguards in place.
The action is the third set of preliminary findings against TikTok this year. In February, the Commission targeted the app's addictive design, and in July it faulted protections for minors' accounts. The broader investigation began in early 2024.
Officials acknowledged that other platforms also steer users into similar loops and said the Commission is looking beyond TikTok, without naming other companies. They described the case as groundwork for the proposed KIDS Act, introduced in September, which would bar platforms from recommending content to children based solely on engagement signals.
Scrutiny is also building in the United States. In August, U.S. senators pressed TikTok about Chase Nasca, a teenager who died by suicide in 2022. This week, Google, Meta and TikTok sued California over a state law barring users under 16 from potentially addictive features.
