EU Says TikTok's For You Recommender Can Pull Users Into Harmful Rabbit Holes

The European Commission has accused TikTok of breaching the Digital Services Act through the recommender behind its For You page, which it says can pull users into harmful "rabbit holes", where a feed keeps narrowing around one theme. The accusation is set out in preliminary findings, not a final decision.

The Commission's core technical objection concerns feedback. It said TikTok's personalised algorithm shows users more similar videos the more they interact with a given kind of content. Engadget reports that the Commission views this interaction-driven loop as the mechanism that produces the problem.

According to the Commission, endless and repeated exposure to content about sadness, isolation or body image can harm users' mental health. It said the risk is greatest for vulnerable adults and minors.

In its preliminary findings, the Commission said TikTok did not do enough to assess how the algorithm could draw users into rabbit holes that put wellbeing at risk. It also said TikTok had not put sufficient mitigation measures in place.

The Commission further said that tapping "not interested" on a video may not be enough to change TikTok's content feed. That point goes directly to the "not interested" control and other user-control mechanisms that platforms routinely cite as safeguards.

The Commission's proposed remedies are specific. It said TikTok must change the For You page design to rely more on explicit preferences, disable viewing time (how long a user lingers on a clip) as a recommendation signal, increase the accessibility of user controls, and regularly test its algorithm.

If the EU confirms the findings, TikTok parent ByteDance could face a fine of up to 6% of annual global revenue.

TikTok has rejected the claims. It says the Commission's statements are fundamentally inaccurate and distort its platform architecture and its commitment to user safety.

The broader context here is that the case is less about the content TikTok hosts than about how its ranking system learns and what it is required to measure. The Commission's focus falls on the feedback loop, the signals that feed it and the risk assessment that should precede deployment. For engineers, the remedies read as a concrete list of ranking changes: weighting explicit feedback above implicit engagement, removing dwell time from the signal set, making negative feedback materially effective, and running continuous algorithmic testing.

In my view, the most consequential question is whether a "not interested" signal can be made to carry real weight without degrading the feed's relevance for the large majority of users who never encounter a problem. That tension sits at the heart of every recommender that optimises for engagement, and this case will test how the Digital Services Act's risk-based obligations apply to it in practice.

The outcome also matters for users, who have long been asked to manage their feeds through indirect signals they cannot easily see. If the remedies are adopted in the form the Commission describes, the most concrete change for ordinary users would be a feed that responds to stated preferences rather than to how long a thumb lingers on a clip.