EU examines video recommendations from TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat

TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat face questions from the European Commission about how their video recommendation algorithms work. The EU executive announced this on Wednesday (October 2nd).

The investigation, carried out under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), will examine why vulnerable people are being “fed” election-related disinformation or content that glorifies eating disorders, depression and substance abuse, among others.

The Commission is interested in the impact of features such as autoplay and infinite scrolling, as well as what safeguards platforms put in place to prevent the spread of harmful content.

According to the DSA, the largest online platforms with more than 45 million monthly users must meet strict transparency requirements.

A senior EU official said the investigation should be a “wake-up call” for platforms to change their behavior – such as allowing users to hide certain types of videos.

Websites that fail to provide documents or provide false information by November 15 will face fines under EU law.

However, the investigation is only the first step

The EU executive will decide whether to launch a formal procedure after analyzing the responses.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is not affected by this particular request. The commission issued a separate one in May Investigationto determine whether the user interfaces of these networks exploit children’s inexperience to encourage their addictive behavior.

The EU has already launched investigations into TikTok, the social media network X and the Chinese online retailer AliExpress. A senior commission official said last month that further investigations into alleged violations of the DSA would soon be underway.