Tiktok only has 24 hours to respond to the demands made.
On Monday, the European Commission opened an investigation into the social service Tiktok’s new Tiktok Lite application.
Tiktok has been given until Wednesday 24.4. until time to respond, or the commission plans to decide whether to ban the feature of concern on Thursday.
Specifically, the investigation concerns the app’s rewards feature, which allows users to earn points for active actions they take, such as watching videos, giving likes, following other users, and inviting new people to be users of the app. These points can be exchanged for, for example, Amazon gift cards or Tiktok’s internal currency, which can be used to buy gifts for content producers.
“We suspect that Tiktok Lite’s feature is toxic and addictive, especially for children,” wrote the EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton Blueskyssa and in X.
“If Tiktok does not provide convincing evidence of its security – which it has not provided so far – we are ready to introduce partial measures of the Digital Services Act, including the banning of Tiktok Lite’s ‘reward program’,” Breton continued.
The digital services act allows the EU to fine up to 6 percent of the targeted company’s global turnover. For now, however, the EU is threatening Tiktok with a fine of just 1% of its global turnover if it doesn’t provide the requested risk assessment for the feature by Wednesday. It must submit the other required information by 3.5. by.
The investigation is specifically about the fact that Tiktok has not performed and delivered in advance the risk assessment required by the digital market regulation regarding the new feature before the release of Tiktok Lite. The European Commission asked Tiktok to provide one last week.
Tiktok has responded that it is disappointed by the Commission’s decision and points out that the feature in question is not available for people under 18, Reuters write. In addition, it emphasizes that point-earning activities have daily limits.
Tiktok Lite is an alternative version of Tiktok’s title app, which it released for testing in France and Spain earlier in April. The application is only intended as a version requiring minimal resources and data usage, which also works with low-power devices and slow network connections. However, it also includes the reward feature mentioned earlier.
The EU opened a previous investigation against Tiktok related to the digital market regulation in February. Its topic was also the protection of underage users, although in addition to addictive properties, e.g. in terms of things like opaque advertising, the rabbit hole effect and insufficient age verification of users.
Tiktok’s parent company Bytedance is registered in the Cayman Islands. Bytedance emphasizes that it is not a Chinese company.