The European Commission has preliminarily found TikTok in breach of the Digital Services Act — not over a video it failed to take down, but over the way its recommender decides what to show next. The finding, published on 6 November, concerns the "rabbit hole effect" of the For You feed.
The mechanism the Commission describes is the one TikTok's product logic depends on. The more a person interacts with a type of content, the more similar content the algorithm recommends, and the feed keeps serving an uninterrupted stream of personalised videos even when that content concerns sadness, isolation or body image. Repeated, endless exposure of that kind, Brussels argues, can damage mental health — particularly for minors and vulnerable adults.
Both halves of the DSA's risk framework are in scope: the risk assessment TikTok carried out, and the mitigation measures it applied. The Commission acknowledges that TikTok has taken steps, but says they have not been effective enough, and asks for changes to the platform's design rather than to its moderation queue. Among the recommendations: give more weight to users' explicit preferences, because the "not interested" button "may not be enough to change the content feed"; stop using viewing time as a recommendation signal; make user controls easier to reach and use; and test the algorithm regularly.
TikTok rejected the findings outright. A spokesperson told Euronews that the Commission had made "a series of statements that are fundamentally inaccurate" which "distort our platform's architecture and our commitment to user safety", pointing to what the company describes as a strong record of protecting its community. According to the Commission, TikTok's algorithm keeps recommending similar videos even when users signal they do not want them.
The case is the third preliminary DSA finding against TikTok this year — earlier ones concerned "addictive design" features said to encourage compulsive use among children, and inadequate protection of children's privacy — and it follows a July request to Meta to change the addictive design of Facebook and Instagram. The investigation behind it has been running for more than two years.
Preliminary findings are not a verdict. TikTok can respond, and the Commission can then close the case with binding commitments or escalate to a non-compliance decision. The DSA's ceiling for the latter is a fine of up to 6% of global annual turnover.
What makes this one different is where the alleged violation sits. Most DSA enforcement to date has been about content and about transparency — what platforms host, remove, label and report. This finding says the ranking itself is the harm: an optimisation target that maximises engagement reliably walks a user toward more of whatever held their attention, and "more of the same" is not a neutral instruction when the starting point is content about self-harm.
For TikTok that is a harder problem than a moderation backlog. Fixing it means changing what the For You feed is allowed to optimise for — and the company's defence, that the Commission misunderstands its architecture, is also an argument that the architecture should not have to change. Brussels has taken the opposite reading, and set the terms on which the next round will be fought.
