TikTok will not roll out a feature rewarding screen time for European Union users, regulators said Monday — an early win for the EU as it starts cracking down on social media’s online addiction risks.
The popular, Chinese-owned social media platform will permanently withdraw a reward program in its TikTok Lite app in the EU, the European Commission said, as part of legally binding commitments the company is making under the bloc’s new social media law, the Digital Services Act (DSA).
“The available brain time of young Europeans is not a currency for social media — and it never will be,” European Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said in a statement.
TikTok Lite, a data-light version of TikTok, launched a reward program in France and Spain in April offering Amazon vouchers and other rewards to users over 18 who fulfilled tasks including watching videos and liking content. It temporarily suspended the rollout after the Commission opened a probe a few weeks after.
“TikTok is pleased to have reached an amicable resolution and has now withdrawn the TikTok Lite rewards program … which we had already voluntarily suspended,” said a company spokesperson.
Commission officials said the firm also committed not to launch any similar feature under a different name.
Western politicians are increasingly alarmed about the mental health toll that social media and smartphones have been taking on young users.
The newly reelected Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last month promised to take action against addictive platforms during her new mandate. In the United States, the Senate last week overwhelmingly passed an unprecedented draft online safety law, including obligations to disable addictive product features.
The Commission has in the past months cracked down on social media firms that it suspects may have been designing their platforms and algorithms in a way that could keep users glued to their screens. The EU is one of the only regions in the world with a law that allows it to go after such online harms.
The Commission, which supervises dozens of the world’s largest social media firms under the DSA, in the last months opened investigations into TikTok as well as Meta’s Facebook and Instagram over alleged addictive algorithms.
TikTok’s commitment to withdraw a feature in the EU also comes as major tech companies are increasingly pulling features and products from Europe amid a regulatory show of force.
Meta in June paused its plan to collect Europeans’ posts and images on Facebook and Instagram to train its artificial intelligence tools over privacy concerns from regulators. It said a month later it will not release its new AI model over EU regulations.
Apple has said it will block the release of new AI tech over fear it may not comply with the Digital Markets Act that seeks to restrain the dominance of Big Tech companies.
Monday’s announcement marks the first time the Commission obtains binding commitments from a major online platform and closes an investigation under the DSA. It opened its probe into the new TikTok Lite reward feature in April.
The EU enforcers said at the time the program could be harmful to the mental health of users and in breach of the DSA. The Commission also believed TikTok may not be able to correctly identify underage users, meaning teenagers could have also used the feature and spend more time on the viral video app. TikTok failed to provide the Commission with information on the risks of the new feature, officials added.
TikTok later said it would temporarily stop the feature in the EU.
The company, owned by Chinese tech firm ByteDance, still faces a probe opened in February over insufficiently protecting teenagers on its apps, including through an allegedly addictive algorithm and inadequate mechanisms to check users’ ages.
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