Italy’s competition authority has handed TikTok a €10 million penalty for inadequate controls over its content and unfair commercial practices.
Italy’s competition authority has handed TikTok a €10 million penalty for inadequate controls over its content and unfair commercial practices.
The regulator yesterday said it had fined the social media giant for failing to adequately manage content on the platform – especially content that could affect minors and vulnerable individuals. It said the offending content was in fact repeatedly shown to users, promoted by the app’s algorithm, as a means of “stimulating ever-increasing use of the social network”.
The authority noted TikTok’s role in promoting the ‘French scar challenge’, in which users self-harmed by inflicting horizontal bruises on their own face.
“TikTok has not taken adequate measures to avoid the spread of such content, not fully respecting the guidelines it has adopted and which it has made known to consumers, reassuring them that the platform is a ‘safe’ space,” the authority said, highlighting that the company failed to account for the inherent vulnerability of adolescents and their “tendency to emulate group behaviour”.
The regulator also found that TikTok’s algorithm compounded the problem by continuing to disseminate potentially dangerous content through a recommendation system aimed at keeping users on the platform.
Luigi Manna, a partner at Martini Manna, said the fine was the result of growing political pressure to address the perceived negative effect of social media on young people.
“There’s big concerns in Italian society about how young people use these social platforms, and how much they use them,” Manna said. “The [regulators] in Italy are not totally independent, like the judiciary – they have political bodies, executive bodies, so they are very sensitive to social issues. They feel the pressure. And that’s why, in the last few years, these social platforms [have been] under the spotlight.”
It is not the first time that Italian authorities have turned their attention to TikTok: in June 2023 the country’s data protection regulator scrutinised the company over its alleged transfers of user data to China, despite the data regulator in Ireland – where TikTok has its GDPR main establishment – already investigating the issue.
A spokesperson for TikTok said: "We disagree with this decision. The so-called 'French Scar' content averaged just 100 daily searches in Italy prior to the AGCM's announcement last year, and we long ago restricted visibility of this content to U18s, and also made it ineligible for the For You feed."