Brussels Says TikTok Left Teenagers Open to Strangers
On Friday, July 24, 2026, the European Commission formally accused TikTok of breaching the bloc's Digital Services Act, finding that the app's account settings left minors exposed to strangers, cyberbullying and unwanted contact. The preliminary charge, the fourth against TikTok in two years, carries a possible fine of up to 6 percent of the company's global annual revenue.
European Union regulators on Friday charged TikTok with breaching the bloc's online content rules, saying design choices on the video app left teenage users open to cyberbullying and contact from adult strangers, Bloomberg reported. The measure, known as a preliminary finding under the Digital Services Act, escalates a probe the Commission opened in early 2024 into how the ByteDance-owned platform protects children.
In its own statement, the Commission said TikTok's arrangements for younger users fell short of the safety standards the law requires, and that the burden of protecting minors should rest with the platform's design rather than with children themselves, according to the European Commission. TikTok said it would review the findings and continue to work with the regulator, Bloomberg reported.
What the Commission found
At the center of the charge is a single setting. On TikTok, minors could choose to make their accounts public, meaning that any user — including people without a TikTok account — could view their content, the European Commission said. Users aged 13 to 15 could switch their accounts from private to public with little friction, while the accounts of 16- and 17-year-olds could be set so that their videos were recommended to any other user through the app's “For You” feed, according to Bloomberg.
Even a private account was not fully sealed off, the Commission found: a minor could still be discovered through the “followers” and “following” lists of other users, again including by people with no TikTok login. Regulators said those gaps created avenues for cyberbullying, unwanted contact and predatory behavior aimed at children, the European Commission said.
‘Protection should be the default’
The case turns on a principle the Digital Services Act writes into law: that large platforms must build protections for children into the design of their services rather than leaving families to opt in. “A high level of protection should not be an opt-in; it should be the default,” the EU's tech chief, Henna Virkkunen, said in a statement announcing the finding, according to the European Commission.
The finding is preliminary. TikTok can now inspect the Commission's file and reply in writing before regulators decide whether to issue a formal non-compliance ruling, a stage that can run for months, Bloomberg reported. Should the Commission ultimately conclude the platform broke the rules, it could impose a fine of up to 6 percent of the company's global annual turnover.
The fourth charge in two years
Friday's action was the fourth set of preliminary findings the Commission has brought against TikTok under the Digital Services Act in roughly two years, according to Bloomberg. In February, the Commission preliminarily found that features such as infinite scroll, autoplay and a personalized recommendation algorithm encouraged compulsive use, and told the company to change its “addictive” design to protect minors, Al Jazeera reported.
TikTok has been penalized in Europe before. In 2023, an EU regulator fined the platform about 345 million euros over how it handled children's accounts, including sign-up settings that had made teenage profiles public by default, CNN reported. The company has said it subsequently made accounts private by default for users under 16 and disabled direct messaging for those aged 13 to 15.
A wider European reckoning
The charge lands amid a broad push by European governments and regulators to force social platforms to account for the harm their feeds can do to young users. This month the Commission preliminarily found that Facebook and Instagram's “addictive” design may also breach EU law, CNN reported. Days before the TikTok finding, France became the first EU country to bar children under 15 from social media, citing cyberbullying and content that promotes self-harm, according to CNN.
The Digital Services Act, in force since 2024, requires the largest platforms to assess and reduce the risks their services pose and holds them to account when they fail. For TikTok, the preliminary finding converts a long-running dispute over how it treats its youngest users into a formal legal question — one that will now be answered in Brussels, with a multibillion-euro penalty among the possible outcomes, Bloomberg reported.