The European Commission has told TikTok that the way its For You feed learns what people want may break EU law, and that fixing it means dropping viewing time as a signal.
In preliminary findings, the Commission said TikTok failed to mitigate the mental health risks of its personalized feed, in violation of the Digital Services Act (the EU's rulebook for large online platforms). The complaint centers on the "continuous stream of personalized videos" and on how the algorithm reads interest. Repeated interaction with triggering content counts as positive interest, which the Commission says produces a "rabbit hole effect."
The Commission wrote that this design "can be harmful when such endless and repeated exposure involves, for example, content about sadness, isolation or body image," with vulnerable adults and minors most exposed.
The suggested fixes are specific. TikTok should rely more on users' explicit preferences, disable viewing time as an indicator for recommending content, make user controls easier to find and use, and regularly test its algorithm. If TikTok does not comply with the final recommendations, it could be fined up to 6% of its global revenue.
The notable part is the target. The Commission is not asking TikTok to pull categories of videos. It is going after the feedback loop that decides what comes next, and that loop depends heavily on how long someone lingers. Swapping that for what users say they want would change the feed's basic logic, not just its guardrails.
The same idea runs through a separate fight in the US. TikTok, Meta and Google have each sued California's attorney general to block a state law banning "addictive" and "psychologically exploitative" design features, including infinite scroll, autoplay and personalized recommendations. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are treating design, not individual posts, as the thing to regulate. The EU's findings are still preliminary and aimed at one company, so the open question is how far TikTok will go to rebuild a feed that, by the Commission's account, works as intended.