Any stranger on the internet, including people without a TikTok account, can view what a child posts on the platform. That’s not a bug or an edge case. It’s how TikTok works by default, and European regulators have finally had enough.
The European Commission has issued preliminary findings that TikTok’s account settings for minors fail to meet the safety standards required under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The core problem is straightforward: minors can set their accounts to public, and once they do, their content becomes visible to literally anyone, on or off the platform. For users aged 16 to 17, that content can also be pushed to any other TikTok user through the For You Feed, meaning a teenager’s videos can reach an audience they never chose and can’t meaningfully control.
But it gets worse. Even when a minor chooses a private account, they’re not fully protected. Their profile photo remains visible to anyone, and their account can be easily found by browsing the follower and following lists of other users. So the private setting is, in practice, more of a suggestion than a shield.
The Commission’s concern isn’t abstract. Investigators spoke with law enforcement officers and experts in child protection, child abuse, and neuropsychology. The risks they identified include unwanted contact from predators, cyberbullying, and the fact that content posted during adolescence can follow someone permanently into adulthood. These aren’t theoretical harms.
Under the DSA, platforms that are accessible to minors must provide a high level of privacy, safety, and security by default, not as an optional setting that a child has to seek out and activate. The Commission’s position is that TikTok should change the default so that a minor’s content is visible only to users they’ve explicitly accepted. Older minors might be allowed to choose a broader audience, but that audience should never extend outside the platform to the general public. The For You Feed recommendation of minors’ content should stop entirely.
This matters beyond TikTok. The DSA was designed precisely to force platforms to treat child safety as a structural obligation rather than a reputational talking point. These findings are part of a broader investigation into TikTok launched in February 2024 that has already produced preliminary findings on addictive design features and separately addressed advertising transparency. The pattern emerging from that investigation is one of a platform that consistently chose engagement over protection.
TikTok now has the right to review the Commission’s investigation files and respond in writing. If the findings are confirmed, the company could face a fine of up to 6% of its global annual turnover. That’s a number large enough to mean something, though whether it’s large enough to actually change how a platform this size builds its products is a different question entirely. The Commission’s next step, a formal non-compliance decision, would answer it.