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TikTok preliminarily found in breach of the DSA over harmful ‘rabbit holes’ effect of its ‘For You’ feed
5Rights welcomes the European Commission’s preliminary findings against TikTok over the ‘rabbit holes’ effect of its recommender system.
The European Commission has now preliminarily found that TikTok failed to adequately assess and mitigate the risk of its recommender system drawing users into rabbit holes. The findings follow others related to addictive desing in February 2026 and to the protection of minors in July 2026.
In particular, the Commission recognises that personalised recommendation systems can lead users down harmful ‘rabbit holes’. By repeatedly exposing users to content relating to mental health, isolation and body image, platforms like TikTok can cause serious negative effects on users’ wellbeing, including increased feelings of sadness or anxiety, body dissatisfaction, lower self-esteem, or worsening of existing eating disorders and mental conditions. 5Rights welcomes this recognition that addictive design features such as algorithm-driven recommendations foster harm.
These concerns are not new. In 2021, 5Rights research found that TikTok, Instagram and Facebook were targeting accounts registered to children as young as 13 with harmful content within the first 24 hours on the platform. More recently, a new 5Rights study has found that three in four children using TikTok in the UK did so between midnight and 6am. A similar pattern has emerged across Europe where almost 1 in 10 children in Europe feel pressured to skip sleeping or eating to spend time online.
Risk created by design must be addressed in design. The EU KIDS Act must therefore include a clear and explicit list of what services must and must not do, following the approach set out in the Safety by Design Chapter. As our joint statement on the proposal makes clear, that list must explicitly prohibit design practices known to put children at risk, including recommender systems that drive compulsive engagement and amplify exposure to harmful content.
Manon Letouche, Head of EU Affairs at 5Rights said:
“These findings confirm what we have warned about for years: TikTok’s recommender system is designed to keep children scrolling, even when that means harming their mental health and wellbeing. Enforcing the DSA is essential, but children cannot wait for the outcome of each investigation, platform by platform. The EU KIDS Act must make clear which design practices are off-limits, so that risks are prevented before children are exposed to them.”
The DSA already requires platforms to identify assess and mitigate the systemic risks arising from the design and functioning of their services. Effective enforcement of these obligations is essential to hold platforms accountable for their design choices, but enforcement of the DSA alone is not enough.
Companies should have to prove that their services are safe for children before reaching them. Children and families should not be left to deal with the risks after they have already been exposed to them. These preliminary findings are a reminder that effective enforcement of the DSA remains essential to tackling harmful online design and protecting children online, alongside existing protections and forthcoming initiatives, such as the Digital Fairness Act and the proposed EU KIDS Act.
