The European Commission has issued preliminary findings that TikTok breached the Digital Services Act by failing to take appropriate and effective measures to reduce the risk its recommendation system poses to users' mental health.
The behaviour at issue has a name: the rabbit hole. The Commission says TikTok's system repeatedly shows users similar videos, trapping them in a content loop that is hard to escape.
How the Commission describes the mechanism
The For You feed selects videos based on a user's interests and activity. Watching, scrolling past or liking a video is read by the algorithm as interest, and more of the same follows.
That is not a malfunction — it is the feed working exactly as designed. Which is precisely the Commission's point. The regulator is not alleging a bug; it is alleging that the intended behaviour creates a foreseeable harm the company was required to mitigate and did not.
The particular concern is content about depression, loneliness and body image, where children and teenagers face a higher risk. A loop is one thing when the subject is cooking. It is another when a user who paused on one video about self-image is shown forty more.
The penalty, and what is being asked
If the concerns are not addressed, TikTok's parent company ByteDance could be fined up to 6% of its total annual worldwide turnover — a figure calculated on global revenue, not on European revenue, which is what gives the DSA its weight.
The Commission has asked for three specific changes: redesign the For You algorithm to give more weight to users' own stated preferences and direct instructions; make content control tools easier to find and use; and regularly test how the algorithm behaves and what effect it has.
Henna Virkkunen, the Commission's technology chief, framed it simply — users who scroll or like get fed more of the same, and TikTok must take more effective steps. She stressed the protection of minors.
TikTok's answer
TikTok rejected the allegations, saying the Commission's claims misrepresent basic facts about how the platform is structured and about its efforts to keep users safe. It says it is working to give users direct control over their content experience.
This is the second round. Last February the Commission issued preliminary findings on TikTok's addictive design, inadequate child protection and limits on researchers' access to platform data. TikTok called those allegations "completely false".
Why this reaches beyond Europe
The Commission is separately investigating whether Facebook and Instagram recommendation systems produce the same effect, so this is a test of the mechanism rather than of one company.
And the remedies, if they come, will not stay in Europe. Rebuilding a recommendation algorithm to weight explicit user preference over inferred interest is not something a company does for one market and reverses at the border. Bangladesh has one of TikTok's larger user bases and no equivalent regulator — so whatever Brussels forces will arrive here as a side effect, which is how most platform regulation has reached this country so far.
