BRUSSELS Chinese social media company TikTok is likely to be subject to stricter EU online content rules because of the number of active users it has set out under the Digital Services Act DSA, a senior executive at the company said on Wednesday.
The landmark rules take a tougher line on very large online platforms, characterising these as companies with more than 45 million users.
Risk management obligations, external and independent auditing, sharing data with authorities and researchers and adopting a code of conduct are some of the requirements for such companies.
Violations can result in fines of as much as 6 per cent of a company's global turnover.
The European Commission can designate which are the very large online platforms and very large online search engines because of the fact that they will report their user numbers on February 17.
Caroline Greer, Director of Public Policy and Government Relations, said that we do expect that our EU user base will meet the quantitative criteria to be considered a very large online platform, but we are still waiting for the designation process to be done by the DSA to understand whether we will be classified as such.
In 2020, TikTok said its users in Europe surpassed 100 million.