EU issues first Online Safety Act enforcement action against TikTok over child protection

The European Commission has issued preliminary findings against TikTok for potential breaches of the Digital Services Act related to the protection of minors, including failures in age verification, privacy-by-default settings for children, and transparency around advertising and content recommendation systems. The Commission's investigation, opened in February 2024, found that TikTok's systems may allow underage users to access the platform despite age restrictions, that default privacy settings may not be sufficiently protective, and that the design of certain features including the Lite version's reward programme may stimulate addictive behaviour. If confirmed, TikTok could face fines of up to six percent of global annual turnover.

Regulatory enforcement actions identify systemic platform failures but typically mandate process improvements, transparency reporting and design changes that still leave the detection of individual harm to reactive content moderation. A targeted detection layer operates at the conversation level, where grooming and sextortion occur in direct messages through patterns of sustained contact, escalation and coercion that unfold over hours or days. Guardii's real-time detection across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms flags those patterns as they develop, reporting the seriousness and shape of an exchange to a parent, school or authority without handing anyone a transcript, and blocking contact that matches known predatory signatures before it reaches the child. That mechanism addresses the conduct the regulator seeks to prevent, closing the operational gap between platform-level compliance and protection of the individual child at risk.