TikTok's For You feed breaks EU rules, Commission says

What is the TikTok rabbit hole effect?

TikTok picks the next video based on what you watched, how long you watched it and whether you liked it. That makes it easy to find things you enjoy. It can also keep serving near-identical content.

The Commission's example: you feel low and watch a video about sadness or loneliness. The feed then offers more of the same, and you may end up seeing little else. The Commission calls this the "rabbit hole effect", after the hole Alice falls down in Alice in Wonderland.

It is most worried about children and people who are already struggling. Repeated exposure to videos about sadness, loneliness or body image, it says, could harm mental health.

What does the EU want TikTok to change?

TikTok does have tools for tuning what you see. According to the Commission's investigation, they are not effective enough. It wants changes to the system itself, such as dropping watch time as a factor in recommendations and making it easier for users to steer what they see.

This is not the first finding of this kind. In February the Commission reached a preliminary view that infinite scroll, autoplay and notifications, which can encourage compulsive use, were also not adequately assessed or addressed.

Japan is having a similar debate. On 28 October the Children and Families Agency met to discuss revising a law on young people's internet use, with infinite scroll, autoplay and recommendations on the table. One idea is to require large services to assess risks to children and act on them.

The common thread: deciding when to stop watching used to be the user's job alone. Regulators now want the people who build the feed to share the responsibility.