The EU wants TikTok to stop using your watch time to pick your next video

Europe’s regulators want TikTok to stop doing the thing that makes its For You feed feel so uncannily personal: counting how long you linger on each video. The European Commission says the app’s recommendation engine pulls people into “rabbit holes” of content about sadness, isolation and body image, and that the tools TikTok offers to climb out do not work well enough.

Anyone who has tapped “not interested” on a clip and then watched near-identical videos keep arriving will recognize the complaint. Brussels says the algorithm gives more weight to viewing time than to an explicit request to see less, so a user who lingers on weight-loss videos, even unhappily, gets served more of them. If that conclusion holds, TikTok would have to rebuild how its main feed decides what you see next in Europe.

The case rests on two charges. The first is that TikTok did not properly assess how its recommendation design could lead users into those spirals. According to the Commission, the system reads repeated watching or liking of potentially triggering material as a positive sign of interest, and that repeated exposure can feed sadness, anxiety, body dissatisfaction, lower self-esteem and the worsening of eating disorders. Minors and vulnerable adults are named as the people most at risk.

The second charge is that the safeguards TikTok already has fall short. The company says it mixes different kinds of videos into the feed, and it offers controls such as a topic manager that lets users turn subjects up or down. The Commission’s view is that this diversification does not reduce how often similar videos appear, including those about mental health struggles, and that the controls “do not effectively enable users to control the content recommended to them.”

What the regulator wants is unusually specific. At this stage, it says TikTok should rely more on the preferences users state outright, disable viewing time as a signal for recommendations, make its controls easier to find and use, and test its algorithm regularly. Watch time is one of the main signals behind short-video feeds, so dropping it would change how TikTok works at its core. A tweak to the settings menu would not satisfy that demand.

TikTok rejects the findings. “The Commission has made a series of statements that are fundamentally inaccurate and distort our platform’s architecture and our commitment to user safety,” a spokesperson told Euronews Next, adding that the company has “a strong record of protecting our community while giving users direct and intuitive control over their content experience.”

There are reasons to keep expectations in check. These are preliminary findings, not a ruling, and the Commission itself says they do not prejudge the outcome. TikTok can now read the investigation file and answer in writing, and cases under the Digital Services Act move slowly: the addictive-design findings issued earlier this year, which pointed at infinite scroll, have not yet produced a final decision. The Commission has also not published the internal TikTok data it relied on, so outsiders cannot yet judge how strong its evidence is.

Any change would be legally required only inside the European Union. Users in the US, Latin America and Asia would see no difference unless TikTok chose to apply the fix everywhere, and its track record points the other way. When the Digital Services Act first took effect, TikTok gave European users the option of a For You feed that is not personalized, but did not offer that switch worldwide.

The pressure is not limited to one app. In July, the Commission told Meta to change what it called the addictive design of Facebook and Instagram, and TikTok has already faced preliminary findings over the protection of minors’ accounts.

The Commission published the findings on November 6, 2026, within formal proceedings against TikTok that opened in early 2024. The same case produced findings on addictive design in February 2026 and on minors in July 2026, while a strand on advertising transparency closed with binding commitments in December 2025. Ireland’s media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, supported the investigation. The European Board for Digital Services will now be consulted while TikTok prepares its defense. If the Commission confirms its view, it can issue a non-compliance decision with a fine of up to 6% of the company’s total worldwide annual turnover.

Tags: social media, tiktok, European Commission, mental health, algorithms, For You feed