When the European Union stepped in, TikTok took down a game-like function in that area. TikTok is having more and more legal problems in the US, so the news, which happened late Wednesday night local time, wasn’t given much attention.
The EU started looking into a “task and reward” feature on the TikTok Lite app two days before TikTok did. They were worried that it could be too addicting for young people and put their mental health at risk. People can use this function to get points for doing things like liking and watching TikTok videos. Early this month, ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, released this version of TikTok Lite in France and Spain.
The Digital Services Act (DSA), which is the EU’s new set of rules for online governance and content moderation, says that TikTok has to reduce systemic risks in areas like mental health and kid safety. It didn’t have a risk assessment study on the feature, though, when the bloc’s enforcers asked for one.
Should it be found to have broken EU rules, the company could be fined up to 6% of its global annual sales under the DSA. This is a big deal.
Yesterday, TikTok said in a statement on X that it is “voluntarily suspending” the rewards tool in the area to address concerns. But on Monday, the Commission made it clear that it was ready to force TikTok’s hand by saying it was going to use the DSA’s “interim measures” powers to shut down the app while it looked into the feature.
The EU gave TikTok two days to make its case against being shut down. As it turned out, TikTok chose to avoid punishment by announcing a “voluntary” suspension.
This shows that even the fear of temporary enforcement can be strong enough to make platform giants think again. (This kind of thing has happened before with similar powers in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. For example, in 2019, Google decided to stop humans from reviewing audio clips recorded by its voice AI after a data protection authority told Google it was going to use an urgent proceeding to order it to stop processing the data.)
By acting before an official order is given, this well-known crisis PR strategy tries to avoid the bad press that comes with a forced shutdown.
Still, the EU is coming out on top: In a post on X in response to TikTok’s statement, the bloc’s internal market commissioner and internet police officer, Thierry Breton, said, “Our children are not guinea pigs for social media.”
Additionally, Breton wrote that he “takes note” of TikTok’s decision to end the prize program for the Lite app in the EU. He also said, “The cases against TikTok on the risk of addictiveness of the platform continue.”
We called TikTok to find out what was going on with the TikTok Lite app in France and Spain. If you have an older phone or mostly use 2G or 3G networks, TikTok Lite is a different app that you can use instead of TikTok.
The EU has two DSA investigations going on at the moment into TikTok. The first, which was revealed in February, is looking into a wide range of possible violations in areas such as child safety, ads transparency, and researchers’ access to data. The second one, which was released earlier this week, is all about TikTok Lite.
Also Read: A Bill is Passed by the Senate That Would Ban Tiktok if Bytedance Doesn’t Buy It
Still, Elon Musk’s X was the first very big online platform to be investigated by the DSA. This happened in December, just a few months after the deadline in late August. That probe is still going on as well.
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