EU Digital Services Act enforcement against Meta and TikTok
The European Commission has announced that both Meta Platforms (owner of Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok are preliminarily found to be in breach of the bloc’s landmark Digital Services Act (DSA). This formal notice, issued on 24 October 2025, signals a major escalation in digital-platform regulation across the 27-member bloc.
According to the Commission’s statement, both companies failed to meet transparency obligations required under the DSA. In particular, the firms did not provide adequate access to their public data for independent researchers, thereby limiting scrutiny of how harmful content flows or is managed on their platforms. On top of that, Meta is singled out for making it overly complicated for users of Facebook and Instagram to report illegal content. The Commission cites “dark patterns” — interface designs that confuse or discourage users from flagging materials such as child-abuse imagery or terrorist content — and notes the appeals process is inadequate.
Meta has rejected the claims, emphasising that it implemented updates to content-reporting, appeals and data-access tools since the DSA came into force. Meanwhile TikTok responded that it will review the findings, but argued that fulfilling the transparency obligations of the DSA may conflict with the region’s data-protection rules under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Should the investigation conclude in a definitive decision that either company breached the law, the potential fines could reach up to 6 % of their global annual turnover – a sum potentially running into multiple billions of dollars.
This action marks one of the first major enforcement signals under the DSA against large online platforms. The Commission’s move underscores the EU’s intent to hold digital-platform operators to high standards of transparency, user empowerment, and accountability in content moderation. The firms now have the opportunity to respond to the Commission’s preliminary findings. The final ruling will determine whether significant penalties, remedial orders or other enforcement measures follow.
