The big picture: The European Commission has formally accused TikTok of designing its product to be addictive – particularly for minors – and indicated that features such as infinite scroll may need to change. This marks the first time EU regulators have treated addictive design as a systemic risk under the bloc's Digital Services Act. While the DSA has previously been used to assess misinformation and transparency concerns, the Commission has never before interpreted a product's core design as a potential risk to users' mental health.
The Commission's preliminary ruling identifies TikTok's endless feed, algorithmic recommendations, and lack of built-in usage limits as central to the problem. Officials say the company may be required to disable its infinite scroll, introduce stricter screen-time interventions, and adjust how its recommendation systems deliver content.
TikTok now has the opportunity to respond and review the evidence underlying the findings. If it fails to persuade regulators, the company could face fines of up to six percent of its global annual revenue.
EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen has framed the case as part of a broader effort to address the harms social media can cause – particularly to young users – under the Digital Services Act. Civil society groups, including Katarzyna Szymielewicz's Panoptykon Foundation in Warsaw, have welcomed the preliminary findings, arguing that they mark an important step toward reining in platforms built on surveillance-driven, engagement-maximizing business models.
Experts see broader implications for Meta's Facebook and Instagram, which are already under parallel investigation for similar design patterns. Jan Penfrat, a senior policy adviser at digital rights group European Digital Rights (EDRi), said it would be "very, very strange" if the Commission did not use the TikTok case as a template to pursue other companies as well.
The European probe has been two years in the making. Early concerns over TikTok's data usage and transparency were reportedly resolved through cooperation, but the question of whether its design harms users has pushed regulators into new legal territory.
The Digital Services Act requires large platforms to assess and mitigate "systemic risks," including those related to mental health, though it leaves the definition of such risks open-ended. By explicitly identifying addiction as one of those categories, regulators have now signaled how they intend to draw the line. For tech companies dependent on engagement metrics, the implications are profound.
Policy experts expect any platform redesigns to take time. "It could be anything from changing default settings to outright prohibiting a specific design feature, or requiring more user control," Peter Chapman, associate director at the Knight-Georgetown Institute, told Politico. He noted that addictive design varies across platforms: notifications about private messages, for example, carry a different behavioral risk than alerts urging users to rejoin a livestream.
TikTok has rejected the Commission's account of its system, calling the findings "categorically false and entirely meritless." Spokesperson Paolo Ganino said the company would use "every means available" to challenge the ruling, a sign that the dispute could stretch for months, if not years.
The Digital Services Act allows for lengthy negotiations before final measures are enforced. In past cases against other platforms, such as X, more than a year passed between the initial findings and the issuance of a formal ruling. Observers expect TikTok to follow a similar path, offering incremental design changes as it makes its case.
Meanwhile, Meta faces its own scrutiny, both from the Commission and in US courts. Its executives, including Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, have defended the platform against allegations that it knowingly amplified engagement at the expense of users' well-being. TikTok and Snap Inc., by contrast, chose to settle a similar California lawsuit earlier this year.
For the Commission, the TikTok investigation represents more than a single enforcement action – it is an attempt to establish a legal baseline for what healthy platform behavior looks like. The EU may tailor its orders on a platform-by-platform basis, taking into account the degree of control users already have.
That principle could extend far beyond Europe. Once Brussels formalizes the reasoning behind this case, other jurisdictions may follow – either by updating consumer protection laws or by setting design standards for recommendation systems and usage controls.
The case against TikTok signals that the era of largely unregulated attention engineering may be nearing its end, and that the EU intends to define its boundaries first.
Europe is coming after infinite scroll – TikTok's endless feed is now a legal problem
