EU 1, TikTok 0 – Rewards Program Gone

The EU has designated TikTok as a major player (what the EU calls a VERY LARGE ONLINE PLATFORM) like Facebook and Twitter and as a result, they are regulating it under the Digital Services Act, one of the EU’s new laws to fight the mega (US) tech companies.

TikTok did have a rewards program which allowed users to collect points for spending more time on the platform.

Users could trade in the points for things like Amazon vouchers and PayPal gift cards.

Needless to say, programs like this are designed to addict people and it is particularly addictive to young people.

The Digital Services Act regulates, among other things, addictive behaviors like this.

The EU claimed that TikTok did not conduct a diligent assessment of risk – likely because if they did, they would come to the same conclusion that the EU came to.

The Digital Services Act requires these handful of very large online platforms to complete these risk assessments AND TURN THEM OVER TO THE EU COMMISSION before launching new programs that it deems “likely to have a critical impact on systemic risks”,

For new features that meet these thresholds, these very large companies need to adopt effective mitigating measures, which, of course, would completely defeat the purpose of launching the features, which is to get kids to spend even more time on the platform than they already do.

It is fair to say that TikTok has not been having a good year, what with the US threatening to ban the platform entirely if they don’t sell it and the EU declaring it a VLOP.

SOoooo, the rewards program is now history. I am sure that parents are celebrating. But only in the 27 EEA countries that are bound by this agreement.

They also agreed not to launch any similar program in the future.

TikTok and its competitors should get ready for more of this, especially in the EU which is much more regulation heavy than the United States.

I would not expect anything like this to happen in the US, so the total ban of TikTok, which really will only cause kids to move to a different platform, won’t have much effect. The Chinese will, instead, step up their efforts to steal the data that they used to collect in the app.

Credit: The Record

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