Responding to the European Commission’s preliminary findings that TikTok is in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA) because of the “rabbit hole” effect of its recommender system, Lisa Dittmer, Amnesty International Researcher on Children and Young People’s Digital Rights, said:
“The Commission’s preliminary finding that TikTok’s ‘For You’ feed puts users’ wellbeing at risk is a welcome and urgently needed step in the fight for accountability and safer online platforms. Amnesty International’s research has repeatedly documented how TikTok draws some children into rabbit holes of depressive and suicidal ideation content. Young people and bereaved parents shared with us how TikTok’s feed normalized and exacerbated teenagers’ struggles with depression and self-harm. This should never have been allowed to happen.
“The European Commission’s decision echoes our conclusion that TikTok had failed to adequately assess and mitigate these risks. TikTok must now finally comply with European regulation and ensure that its platform is safe for children and adults alike. It is time to fundamentally change social media: an industry whose major players’ business models are all too often purpose-built on the exploitation of people’s attention and vulnerabilities. Regulators must now go further through additional regulations to reverse the burden of proof and create binding standards for platform design to put an end to addictive and toxic feeds.”
Background
Amnesty International’s 2025 report ‘Dragged into the Rabbit Hole’, documented how TikTok’s ‘For You’ feed pushed French children and young people engaging with mental health content into a cycle of depression, self-harm and suicide content leading to a formal DSA complaint.
Prior to that, Amnesty International’s 2023 reports ‘Driven into the Darkness: How TikTok Encourages Self-harm and Suicidal Ideation’ and ‘I Feel Exposed: Caught in TikTok’s Surveillance Web’ highlighted abuses experienced by children and young people using TikTok in relation to their rights to health, freedom of thought and privacy, and the ways in which these abuses are linked to TikTok’s recommender system and the underlying business model.
At the time of writing TikTok had not publicly responded to the preliminary findings. TikTok’s full responses to Amnesty International’s research findings can be found in the annexes to the reports mentioned above.