The EU has launched a formal investigation into whether TikTok has broken online content rules, including the safeguarding of children.
The EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, said it had opened official proceedings against the Chinese-owned short video platform over a potential breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA).
It said the investigation was looking at areas including protection of minors, maintaining records of its advertising content and whether its algorithms led users down damaging content “rabbit holes”.
Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for internal market, said the protection of children was a “top enforcement priority” for the DSA. The investigation into child safety on the platform includes looking at age verification – an issue highlighted by a Guardian investigation into TikTok last year – and the default privacy settings used for children’s accounts.
“As a platform that reaches millions of children and teenagers, TikTok must fully comply with the DSA and has a particular role to play in the protection of minors online,” Breton said. “We are launching this formal infringement proceeding today to ensure that proportionate action is taken to protect the physical and emotional wellbeing of young Europeans. We must spare no effort to protect our children.”
Companies that breach the DSA face the threat of fines of up to 6% of their global turnover. TikTok, which does not publish its revenues, is owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance.
TikTok said it would continue to work with experts and the industry to keep young people on its platform safe and that it looked forward to explaining this work in detail to the European Commission.
“TikTok has pioneered features and settings to protect teens and keep under-13s off the platform, issues the whole industry is grappling with,” a TikTok spokesperson said.
The TikTok investigation marks the second DSA investigation, after Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, became the subject of a formal investigation by Brussels in December last year.
