The European Union’s digital services regulation has given his first big hit: TikTok has agreed to permanently close the TikTok Lite app that paid for watching videos or recommending users. Based on this recent regulation, the European Commission opened a case against the Chinese social network in April for a service that did not provide guarantees to prevent access by minors or prevent it from being addictive. Bytedance, TikTok’s parent company, temporarily suspended the service and has now committed to its definitive withdrawal.
In just over 100 days, the Digital Services Regulation (DSA) has forced one of the all-powerful digital giants to back down for good. The payment service that TikTok had launched in France and Spain in April of this year had alarmed the European Commission headquarters, which saw the opportunity to test the effectiveness of one of its two new tools – the other being the Digital Markets Regulation (DMA) – to keep the big players on the internet (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google, Bytedance) in check. On April 22, it announced that it was opening an investigation and warned of its intention to suspend the application. The Chinese company’s response was immediate: it was shelving its project for the moment.
In order to stop the investigation and comply with the law, the Asian company has finally offered to “permanently withdraw the TikTok Lite Rewards program from the EU and not launch any other program that circumvents the withdrawal.” Brussels has accepted the offer and makes it “legally binding,” it explains. “This means that any failure to comply with them would immediately amount to an infringement of the DSA and could therefore lead to fines. With this decision, the Commission also closes the formal procedure initiated against TikTok on April 22,” the authority adds.
The European Commission itself explains that this is the first case in which it has deployed the power of the DSA and it has worked. At least, this is what the two members of the College of Commissioners with competence in the area think. “We have achieved the definitive withdrawal of the TikTok Lite rewards programme, which could have had very addictive consequences. The DSA is in full swing,” said the Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton.
For her part, Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager has used the incident to warn that it could happen again: “The safety and wellbeing of social media users must be a top priority. The design features of platforms with addictive effects endanger the wellbeing of their users. That is why we have made TikTok’s commitments under the DSA legally binding. We will closely monitor TikTok’s compliance. Today’s decision also sends a clear message to the entire social media sector.”
This month marks one year since the DSA took its first steps. It then identified platforms that were “very large scale” (VLOP). The list has since grown, also incorporating the large pornographic content portals, for example. All must have more than 45 million users in Europe and this requires them to have mechanisms that allow them to quickly flag and remove illegal content, for which they must have a mechanism for users to report illegal content. They must also act against disinformation, applying mitigation measures if necessary, or protect minors, and fight against gender violence.
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