The European Commission has preliminarily found that TikTok breached the Digital Services Act by failing to adequately address the risk that its personalised ‘For You’ feed repeatedly exposes users to potentially harmful content about mental health and body image.
The findings, announced on November 6, concern both TikTok’s assessment of those risks and the measures it uses to reduce them. The Commission says the platform’s recommendation system can draw users into increasingly repetitive streams of content about subjects such as sadness, isolation and body image, with potentially detrimental effects on mental health, particularly for minors and vulnerable adults.
The decision is preliminary, not a final determination of wrongdoing or a financial penalty. TikTok can examine the evidence, respond to the Commission’s concerns and propose changes before the regulator reaches a final conclusion. Breaches of the DSA can carry fines of up to 6% of a company’s annual worldwide revenue.
At the centre of the case is the relationship between user engagement and subsequent recommendations. As people interact with a particular type of video, TikTok’s system recommends more similar material. The Commission’s concern is that this feedback loop can produce prolonged, repeated exposure to sensitive content rather than a varied stream of videos.
The findings address how the feed operates, rather than simply whether individual videos violate content rules. Recommender systems rank and select material from large pools of available content. A sequence of recommendations can therefore present risks that are distinct from the characteristics of any single post, including when the material is not itself illegal.
POLITICO reported, citing Commission officials speaking anonymously, that the case is the first in which the EU executive has directly targeted a social media platform’s engagement-based recommendation model as a DSA breach. An official told the publication that investigators concentrated on mental health because the evidence was strongest in that area.
The Commission considers TikTok’s existing measures to curb these repetitive content loops ineffective. One official told POLITICO that explicit user preferences, such as selecting an option indicating a lack of interest, should carry greater weight than implicit engagement signals. Those signals can include time spent watching a video and other interactions used to infer what a person wants to see next.
That distinction matters because engagement does not necessarily amount to a deliberate request for more content on the same subject. The regulatory question is whether TikTok adequately recognises and limits the risks created when its system treats those interactions as a basis for further recommendations.
The DSA also requires an option for recommendations that are not based on profiling. A Commission official told POLITICO that only 0.2% of TikTok users select its non-personalised option.
POLITICO described the announcement as the Commission’s fifth accusation that TikTok had breached EU rules, while noting that no fines had yet been imposed on the platform. TikTok previously resolved a DSA investigation into advertising transparency by agreeing to changes with the Commission. The company did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment on the latest findings.
Sources: EU Digital Strategy (AI Office), POLITICO Europe – Tech