EU Digital Services Act: Commission opens formal proceedings against TikTok over child safety
Guardii Analysis
The European Commission announced on 6 September 2026 that it has opened formal proceedings against TikTok under the Digital Services Act for suspected failures to protect minors from harmful content and contact risks, including grooming and exposure to age-inappropriate material. The investigation will examine whether TikTok's recommendation algorithms and direct-messaging features comply with the requirement to mitigate systemic risks to children, with potential fines of up to six percent of global annual revenue.
Enforcement proceedings signal that reactive content moderation and age-gating are insufficient to meet the DSA's risk-mitigation standard. Real-time detection of grooming, coercion and sustained targeting in private messages addresses the contact risk the Commission has identified. Guardii operates across platforms including TikTok's messaging layer, analysing conversation patterns for escalation, isolation tactics and sexual solicitation without storing or exposing message content, and flags or blocks hostile contact before it reaches the child. The platform's architecture meets the DSA's requirement to address systemic harm while respecting user privacy, offering a model for compliance that does not depend on keyword filtering or manual review at scale.