A blunt preliminary finding from the European Commission has put TikTok on notice: change features the EU calls “addictive design” or risk fines and forced redesigns.
The Commission’s investigation — opened in February 2024 under the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) — concluded that TikTok has not sufficiently assessed how elements such as autoplay, personalised recommendations and endless scrolling could harm users’ physical and mental wellbeing, especially children and vulnerable adults. Regulators are now asking the company to propose fixes or face penalties that could reach up to 6% of global annual turnover.
What the EU flagged
In its early view, the Commission said TikTok’s recommender system repeatedly “rewards” users with novel, attention-grabbing content and can push engagement into a kind of autopilot: people scroll more and longer than they intend. Investigators singled out night-time use among minors, dismissible screen-time prompts, and parental controls that are time-consuming to configure as evidence that existing safeguards aren’t adequate.
Suggested remedies are strikingly concrete: implement effective screen-time breaks (including during night hours), change the recommender settings, and consider disabling or curbing “infinite scroll.” Those are not cosmetic tweaks — the Commission said the platform’s basic design may need to change for users in the EU.
Henna Virkkunen, the EU tech chief, warned reporters that TikTok would have to “change the design of their service in Europe” to avoid enforcement measures. Breaches of the DSA can carry both fines and structural remedies; earlier enforcement under the DSA led to a €120m fine for X over a different violation.
Why this matters beyond a legal footnote
Regulators haven’t just been focused on harmful content; this is about the way products are engineered to keep attention. Social scientists and online-safety advocates welcomed the framing. Sonia Livingstone of the London School of Economics said tools that exist aren’t enough to meet the EU’s safety expectations. Social-media analyst Paolo Pescatore called the move a “reality check” that signals a market shift from “maximise engagement” to “engineer responsibility.”
Some observers view the Commission’s language as the clearest regulatory recognition yet that design choices — not merely content moderation — can create risk. Matt Navara, a social-media expert, said this looks rooted in behavioural science: it’s the architecture of the app that nudges compulsive use.
That shift has practical consequences. If TikTok is required to alter core features in Europe, the company may either run a separate EU-tailored product or attempt a global redesign. Either path raises thorny questions about fragmentation, enforcement across jurisdictions, and whether other regulators will follow suit.
TikTok’s response and next steps
TikTok dismissed the findings as “a categorically false and entirely meritless depiction of our platform” and said it would challenge the Commission’s conclusions. The company has an opportunity to respond to the preliminary ruling before the Commission finalises any charges or imposes remedies.
The stakes are high: TikTok doesn’t publish precise revenues, but industry estimates peg ad income in the tens of billions annually — meaning a 6% fine would be a material sum. Beyond fines, forced changes to a recommender algorithm or the removal of infinite scroll would alter the product experience that helped the app grow to more than a billion users.
A wider regulatory climate
The TikTok case sits inside a broader European push to force tech platforms to take responsibility for how their services affect people’s lives. The DSA is one of the EU’s marquee digital laws, and officials have already used it against other major platforms. The Commission’s appetite for remedies that touch product features echoes other examples of regulators demanding technical or UX changes from companies operating in Europe.
For global tech firms, that means features and updates increasingly need to clear a regulatory bar as well as an internal product bar. Companies have already adjusted product behavior in response to EU rules in other contexts; for instance, some firms have announced changes to services used by Apple devices and other platforms to comply with European regulations. See how the EU’s rules have prompted firms to rework cross-device features in the past, such as when Apple prepared adjustments ahead of regulatory deadlines (/news/apple-eu-wifi-sync-removed).
And this enforcement trend could accelerate design-first scrutiny of algorithms and interfaces, even as platforms roll out new AI-driven features and services — a dynamic also seen in how companies modify product behaviour to meet different regional expectations (/news/google-ai-mode-booking-agentic).
What to expect next
The Commission’s statement is a preliminary view; TikTok will be invited to mount a formal defence. If the Commission’s findings are upheld, regulators could demand specific technical fixes and levy fines. Litigation or negotiation seems likely, and the case will be watched closely by other governments, child-safety groups and the wider tech industry.
Whatever the outcome, the message is clear: European regulators are ready to treat product design itself as a vector of risk. That reframes where responsibility sits — not just in the content people see, but in the mechanics that show it to them.
Tags: TikTok, European Union, Digital Services Act, Online Safety, Regulation