EU Charges TikTok for a Third Time: How Default Settings Expose Minors to Predators — and What Happens Next

The Three Specific Violations

The Commission identified three concrete ways TikTok's design falls short:

• Minors aged 13–17 can set their accounts to "public" by default. This means any user — including people without a TikTok account — can view a minor's content and profile .
• Users aged 13–15 can switch to public accounts with minimal effort. The Commission found that while TikTok offers some safety defaults for this age group, the interface makes it trivially easy for children to undermine those protections .
• Adults can view the private profiles of 16–17 year olds. Even when an older teen's profile is set to private, adults can still see their content and interact with them. The Commission concluded this does not meet DSA standards .

The finding is narrow but pointed: TikTok is not being charged for lacking safety features, but for designing those features in a way that children can easily bypass them .

TikTok's Full EU Enforcement Timeline

This latest action is part of a two-year regulatory onslaught against TikTok under the DSA and other EU laws.

Separate non-DSA fines (imposed under GDPR by the Irish Data Protection Commission):

• €345 million (September 2023) — for violating children's data privacy, particularly around age verification and privacy settings in 2020 .
• €530 million (May 2, 2025) — for unlawful transfers of EEA user data to China, with an order to halt transfers unless compliance is achieved within six months .

The Broader EU Push: Beyond TikTok

The Commission's actions against TikTok are unfolding alongside a much wider European drive to protect children online. Key milestones include:

• July 2025: The Commission published DSA guidelines on protecting minors, setting out measures to address risks like grooming and harmful content .
• October 2025: The European Parliament called for an EU-wide digital minimum age of 16 and stressed that platforms must make services "safe by design" rather than shifting responsibility to parents .
• May 12, 2026: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced plans for a Digital Fairness Act, which would impose restrictions on social media including an age limit and requirements for safety-by-design, specifically targeting "addictive designs" .
• July 13, 2026: A special panel on child safety online delivered a report to von der Leyen recommending that social media access be restricted for children under 13 until platforms can prove their services are safe .
• July 24, 2026: The Commission published a child safety online document stating that "the burden of proof needs to be on providers, not regulators, parents and children" until platforms demonstrate their services are safe by design .

What Happens Next: Potential Consequences

TikTok now has the right to respond to the preliminary findings and defend itself before the Commission decides on a final non-compliance decision . If the Commission confirms its preliminary view, it can impose:

• Fines of up to 6% of TikTok's global annual turnover . Given TikTok's parent company ByteDance reported revenue of over $120 billion in 2025, this could amount to billions of dollars.
• Additional corrective measures requiring TikTok to change its default settings and design features for minors .

The company has stated that its teen accounts already include more than 50 privacy and safety features and that it will review the findings .