The European Commission has taken down a TikTok rewards programme amid fears it could have been operating in violation of the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
Concerns regarding the “rewards functions” in ByteDance’s new TikTok Lite app first emerged in April, with the company announcing it was temporarily axing the system after a DSA-based investigation launched by the EC.
That has now been made permanent, with the EC announcing on August 5 that its probe into TikTok Lite had ended after the Chinese social media company agreed to “permanently withdraw” the system from the European Union.
According to the EC’s press release, ByteDance has also promised “not to launch any other programme which would circumvent the withdrawal” of the previous rewards programme.
Commissioners have expressed jubilance at the result, once again claiming the system had posed a risk to children via the alleged encouragement of addictive practices.
“The available brain time of young Europeans is not a currency for social media — and it never will be,” Brussels’s self-styled “digital enforcer” Thierry Breton said in the wake of the decision, adding that the move proved the DSA was in “full swing”.
EC Competition tsar Margrethe Vestager echoed those sentiments, insisting that the “safety and well-being of social media users need to be a number one priority”.
“Design features on platforms with addictive effects put the wellbeing of their users at risk,” she said.
“We will carefully monitor TikTok’s compliance. Today’s decision also sends a clear message to the entire social media industry.”
Since October 2023, the European Commission has deployed the Digital Services Act 56 times against major online platforms and search engines, with more than 50 per cent of cases targeting Meta, X, and TikTok.
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— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) May 21, 2024
