Social media platform TikTok hit with $572.5m fine for breaching child protection laws

European regulator imposes the penalty after platform allowed youngsters to be directly contacted by over-16s.

TikTok disputed the decision and said it had made changes to its practices. Picture: Reuters/The Times

TikTok has been fined €345 million ($572.5) for breaking European laws designed to protect children.

The social media platform set children’s accounts to public by default, enabled them to be paired with unverified adult accounts and allowed child users to be sent direct messages by over-16s.

The ruling was issued by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), which regulates the platform in Europe. The fine relates to breaches on the platform between July 31 and December 31, 2020. The company said it had since changed its practices.

The video-sharing platform was also fined £12.7 million ($24.4m) this year by the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK for illegally having more than one million under-13s on its platform.

A spokesman for TikTok said: “We respectfully disagree with the decision, particularly the level of the fine. The DPC’s criticisms are focused on features and settings that were in place three years ago, and that we made changes to well before the investigation even began, such as setting all under-16 accounts to private by default.”

The DPC in Ireland is taking an increasingly tough stance on the way social media companies handle data.

In January Facebook’s parent company Meta Ireland was fined €390 million for breaches of EU data privacy rules. In the same month WhatsApp was fined more than €5 million over data protection breaches and last year Instagram was fined €405 million over the way that it handled teenagers’ personal data.

Large platforms such as TikTok have had to change their practices after the introduction of the Digital Services Act in Europe this year.

The Times