Why TikTok’s DSA investigation is important

Last week, the European Commission announced it had “preliminarily” found TikTok in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA), referencing so-called addictive design features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and “highly personalised” recommender systems.

If the Commission’s findings are supported by the opinion of the European Board for Digital Services, TikTok could face a fine of up to 6% of TikTok’s total worldwide annual turnover.

This investigation is important not only for TikTok, not only for other social media platforms as a precedent, but is also another important prelude to the European Commission’s broader goals with the upcoming Digital Fairness Act (DFA), which, essentially, will aim to create an additional layer of legislation for both addictive design features and personalised recommender systems.

Recommender systems: so is the DSA actually functional?

Personalised recommender systems, to put it simply, are information-filtering tools that predict and suggest items on various online platforms, tailored to individual users based on their behaviour, preferences, and profiling.

For the user, this results in a tailored online experience - with content and advertisements shown that are relevant to them. The European Commission believes the current legislative framework is not enough, ergo, the Digital Fairness Act (DFA), with plenty of new obligations for online platforms, is needed.

Many industry players and associations have pointed out before that the current legislative framework is already robust and only needs to be implemented well, and the TikTok investigation into its adherence to the Digital Services Act (DSA) proves it, at least in our opinion.

Practical implementation questions

Many other social media platforms already offer options to opt out of autoplay, and, if we had to guess, TikTok is likely to follow the European Commission’s recommendations on that too.

Infinite scroll-wise, the question is a little trickier. Bill Wirtz wrote for EU Tech Loop before that the market already provides many tools - both built into apps and outside of them - to limit social media use: 

“Those who do not want videos to autoplay and who want a limit to how much they can scroll can enable features on the apps that allow them to do that or simply stop using the apps in question. In the same way that our phone providers don't cut off our phone conversations because they've been deemed too long, and our TVs don't time out because we're in the third re-watch of the fifth season of Dr. House, we also don't need paternalists telling us how much time we ought to spend on Facebook”.

The Commission writes that “TikTok did not adequately assess how these addictive features could harm the physical and mental wellbeing of its users, including minors and vulnerable adults.”

How does one differentiate between vulnerable and non-vulnerable adults? Would that mean platforms having to track and store even more personal data, and profile users even more than they already do?

How would de facto bans on infinite scroll - be it through the DSA or the incoming DFA - change if Europeans were to eventually need a Digital ID to download these apps? Currently, one of the major arguments for imposing such restrictions is the harmful effect on minors. If the EU follows up on its plans to introduce Digital IDs for use in app stores, would such a restriction be removed? History shows that it usually isn't, and the stacking of different legislation persists.

Lastly, a rather simplistic but important question - what is an okay amount of time to spend on social media apps - 10 minutes, 15 minutes, or 60 minutes? Creating “quotas” for social media use can only backfire in the long run, with new technological tools being introduced to bypass these restrictions. The logic behind restricting infinite scroll, and what constitutes a “fair amount of use,” is currently murky.