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On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel assassinated the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei. The joint operation marked the first time either state has directly killed a sitting head of state. As with the US’s January 2026 operation against Nicolás Maduro, what stands out is not only the gravity of the act but the manner in which it was justified. Public statements emphasised Khamenei’s record and the sophistication of US-Israeli intelligence cooperation, but they did not articulate a credible legal basis for the strike.

Khamenei’s assassination represents a new stage in the erosion of the international norm against assassination. This norm has long been understood as part of a broader framework protecting sovereignty and prohibiting the use of force outside armed conflict. Under international law, the killing of a state official outside an armed conflict will almost invariably violate the prohibition on the use of force, state sovereignty, and/or international human rights law. In an influential piece written two decades ago, Ward Thomas observed that “the directly targeted killing of foreign adversaries, once rejected as beyond the pale, has become a prominent issue in debates over U.S. security policy”. For Thomas, the shortsighted policies driving the US’s so-called “global war on terror” were undermining the norm and risked spilling over to justify the killing of state officials. Yet, in 2005, he wrote with some relief that “the word ‘assassination’ itself still carries a considerable stigma”. In the wake of Khamenei’s assassination, this statement no longer seems to hold true.

Since the early 2000s, the gradual normalisation of state-sponsored assassination has lessened the stigma attached to the practice to the point that assassinating a sitting head of state without any legal justification has now become a reality. While the international norm against assassination may not yet be fully dead, its recent trajectory offers little hope for its restoration.

A gradual normalisation of assassination

The norm’s erosion was already visible in the January 2020 killing of Qassem Soleimani. The Trump administration initially invoked self-defence and imminence, before shifting to claims that Soleimani had “American blood on his hands”. International reactions were limited: a joint statement by France, Germany, and the United Kingdom focused on regional stability without directly condemning (or indeed mentioning) the killing. Subsequent cases reinforced this pattern. The Biden administration justified the 2022 killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri with the assertion that “justice has been delivered”, without any articulation of its compatibility with international law.

This apparent normalisation of assassination as a tool of statecraft rests on two interrelated mechanisms: routinisation and legitimation. Prior to the attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States was a vocal critic of Israel’s practice of assassinating Palestinian activists. After 9/11, however, it quickly adopted the practice and slowly began to legitimate it. With the US adoption of the practice, now strategically renamed “targeted killings”, assassination became increasingly routinised as a tool of statecraft.

Today, both democratic and authoritarian states employ it, and targets have expanded beyond suspected terrorists to include scientists, political opponents, bloggers, journalists, state officials, and sitting heads of state during armed conflict. Alongside covert poisoning and car bombs, methods have evolved to include drone strikes and AI-assisted targeting. The practice now spans objectives of counterterrorism, deterrence, regime security, and strategic signalling. What was once treated as an exceptional and contested measure has been bureaucratised and normalised as a tool of policy within self-proclaimed liberal democracies such as the United States and Israel. The definitional move from “assassination” to “targeted killing” facilitated this process by situating such operations within the vocabulary of armed conflict after 9/11.

In parallel, legitimation has become possible through a reinterpretation of the applicable legal framework. Since the early 2000s, the United States and Israel have been more vocal in advancing expansive readings of self-defence, imminence, and the existence of non-international armed conflicts beyond traditional battlefields to justify targeting individuals that could not be regarded as lawful targets under stricter legal interpretations. The lack of strong condemnation by other states allowed the legal justifications, however implausible, to provide a precedent for further action.

As this effort at legal justification provided a veneer of legitimacy for the routinised assassination of suspected terrorists, it became increasingly easy to rely on the newfound legitimacy of the practice to assassinate other “enemies of the state”, such as nuclear scientists or state officials like Soleimani, as well as to abandon legal justification altogether, as for al-Zawahiri.

The assassination of Khamenei as a rupture

The assassination of Ali Khamenei differs from the killings of the past two decades insofar as sitting heads of state have historically occupied a distinct normative category. As explained by Thomas, as early as the seventeenth century, “a complex combination of material and ideational factors contributed to the rise of the norm against assassinating foreign leaders” in wartime and, a fortiori, in peacetime. Even when states plotted against foreign leaders during the Cold War (for instance, the US repeatedly attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro), they always did so covertly and rarely acknowledged responsibility when exposed. In later decades, when the US targeted foreign leaders such as Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, it was careful to claim that their deaths would have been an inadvertent consequence of a strike undertaken in self-defence. Such was the stigma against targeting heads of state that, as late as 2022, some authors argued that the norm erosion triggered by targeted killings would remain “compartmentalised” to the targeting of non-state actors.

It must therefore be emphasised that the US-Israeli strike of 28 February 2026 deliberately targeted and killed the sitting head of state of a sovereign state. In addition, Khamenei’s killing was publicly embraced, and its justification was framed in moral rather than legal terms.

Despite repeated violations of the international norm against assassination, its resilience depended on states either concealing their involvement or defending their conduct through appeals to legal exemptions such as self-defence or combatant status. Both practices signalled that assassination remained normatively problematic in the international order.

When assassination is openly acknowledged and only minimally justified in legal terms, as was recently the case with Soleimani, al-Zawahiri, Haniyeh, or Nasrallah, that signal weakens. The threshold then shifts from whether the act can be legally justified to whether the target is sufficiently “bad” to warrant elimination. Whether the targets of recent assassinations “deserved” their fate is, however, less important than the implication of this shift from legality to morality for the international order. While legal arguments can be rebutted, moral claims about worthiness are less susceptible to meaningful contestation.

Alongside Jeremy Waldron, one may therefore begin to ask:“Do we want [assassination] to become a permanent capability available in principle to any of the 192 [now 195] sovereign states in the world that think of themselves as having particular persons as enemies?”

Is the international norm against assassination dead?

The systemic effects of recent assassinations, from drone strikes in Yemen to the assassinations of Soleimani and Nasrallah, are cumulative. Each muted reaction by states that style themselves as the guardians of the “international rule-based order” lowers the political cost of the next strike; each public acknowledgement unaccompanied by legal argument lowers the justificatory threshold for other states and future assassinations. Combined with the widespread availability of drone and long-range strike technologies, assassination becomes both politically easier to defend and materially easier to replicate. As a result, the practice of state-sponsored assassination, which once required covert modalities and plausible deniability, is increasingly conducted openly.

This does not mean that the norm is formally extinguished. Even under the most expansive readings of international law, as advocated by the US and Israel in recent decades, the “targeted killing” of a state official outside an armed conflict still violates the prohibition on the use of force, state sovereignty, and international human rights law. Many states continue to denounce assassination when they consider themselves as victims, and legal scholarship remains largely sceptical of expansive doctrines of imminence or “globalised armed conflict” that would render such killings lawful.

The more difficult question is whether the norm still meaningfully constrains powerful states. Norms do not disappear simply because they are violated. They erode when violations become routine, when justificatory standards decline, and when adverse reactions diminish. The 28 February 2026 assassination of Ali Khamenei features as the culmination of these three dynamics. It suggests that, at least for some states, assassination has moved from a covert and contested practice to an overt, politically defensible, and even desirable instrument of policy.

Should other states emulate this model, and should international responses remain muted, the norm will continue to hollow out. Conversely, sustained contestation, coordinated sanctions, and renewed insistence on legal justification could restore its constraining force. As such, whether the norm against assassination will effectively disappear depends less on the existence of prohibitive rules than on future practice.

Reactions by other states to Khamenei’s assassination will be decisive for the norm’s future trajectory. At present, however, that trajectory points much less toward a restoration of the stigma than toward a full normalisation of assassination as a tool of statecraft.

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In January 2026, Serbia adopted a package of amendments to core judicial statutes, informally labelled the “Mrdić laws”, that together recalibrate key elements of the country’s prosecutorial and judicial framework. While the legislative drafting of the package is formally technical and several political actors, including the law’s namesake MP Mrdić, have framed it as primarily efficiency-oriented, the surrounding political discourse and the institutional context in which the reforms emerged suggest a more contested underlying rationale. In substance, the amendments introduce structural changes whose cumulative effect is likely to weaken the operational autonomy of Serbia’s specialised anti-corruption prosecution and to further entrench hierarchical control within both the judiciary and the prosecution service. The reforms have already triggered visible resistance within the Serbian legal community, including public statements, professional appeals, and protest actions by prosecutors, judges, and civil society actors. The timing of the reforms is particularly salient, as they unfolded alongside a deeply contested election process for the High Prosecutorial Council, marked by repeated voting and open factional divisions within the prosecution service.

At the centre of the reform lies the restructuring of the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Organised Crime (TOK), including mechanisms enabling the large-scale reassignment of prosecutors currently handling politically sensitive cases. Yet the significance of the legislative package cannot be understood by examining the TOK provisions in isolation.

The “Mrdić laws” illustrate a contemporary mode of rule-of-law erosion in which formal guarantees of independence remain textually intact and outwardly suggest only cosmetic adjustments, even as the functional capacity of key institutions is deliberately weakened. The Serbian case illustrates how targeted restructuring, rather than overt dismissal, can operate as an effective technique of prosecutorial and judicial neutralisation, exemplifying one of the many legal cheating strategies that have come to define Europe’s rule-of-law backsliding over the past decade.

The legislative package: scope and architecture

The reform package amended statutes central to the organisation of the Serbian judiciary and prosecution service. The amendments target interlocking domains: the prosecutorial governance framework, the judicial organisational structure, and the civil service regime applicable to justice-sector personnel.

Uglješa Mrdić, Chair of the National Assembly’s Committee on the Judiciary, Public Administration, and Local Self-Government, stated that the adoption of the package of judicial laws would only be the first step in returning what he described as a “hijacked judiciary” to the state and the people of Serbia. He said that the reforms would no longer be governed by, in his words, “alienated centres of power under foreign control.”

The legislative process itself drew criticism. The reforms were adopted through an expedited procedure, omitting the type of inclusive expert deliberation typically expected for structural judicial reforms.

Several of the adopted solutions conflict with applicable international standards and, more specifically, risk undermining the trajectory set by the 2022 constitutional reforms. The 2022 reforms were designed within the EU accession framework to depoliticise the judiciary and prosecution service by reducing direct political influence over appointments and dismissals, thereby encouraging greater self-governance within the justice system. Against that baseline, the current legislative package risks reversing these developments, illustrating how the European model of judicial self-governance may itself become vulnerable to abuse where hierarchical powers of chief prosecutors and court presidents facilitate tighter internal control over rank-and-file judges and prosecutors.

The Centre for Judicial Research (CEPRIS), a Serbian judicial policy think tank, identified several highly contested elements of the reform. These include abolishing the High Prosecutorial Council’s commission responsible for reviewing objections to mandatory prosecutorial instructions, requiring ministerial consent or approval for prosecutorial international cooperation, and reassigning appointment competences for the Special Prosecutor for High-Tech Crime. Further concerns include the possibility of additional mandates for court presidents and acting high chief prosecutors, potentially enabling certain incumbents to extend their tenure and preserve hierarchical influence over judges and prosecutors; and the establishment of a new ordinary court and prosecutor’s office in Belgrade, which may reshape territorial jurisdiction and the distribution of politically sensitive cases. Taken together, these developments will effectively dilute the functional safeguards that the 2022 constitutional amendments sought to strengthen.

The effects of the amendments are highly asymmetrical. While formally system-wide, the reforms disproportionately affect the institutional stability and personnel continuity of specialised prosecutorial bodies, most notably the TOK.

The functional core: restructuring the TOK

The most consequential element of the reform concerns the large-scale reassignment of prosecutors currently serving in the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Organised Crime (TOK). This intervention would be significant under any circumstances. In the present Serbian context, however, it acquires particular constitutional salience because the TOK is not a routine specialised body: it currently carries the burden of some of the most politically sensitive proceedings in the country, including cases directly implicating senior public officials and politically exposed figures.

Under the new framework, a significant number of prosecutors assigned to the TOK are required to return to the previous posts that they held before the TOK was established decades ago, without their consent and within a short transitional window. Formally, this does not constitute a dismissal. Prosecutors remain in service and retain their status. Yet the functional impact is far more disruptive. Complex organised crime and corruption investigations rely on continuity, accumulated case knowledge, and stable investigative teams. According to the Statement of the Collegium of the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Organised Crime, abrupt personnel turnover risks fragmenting prosecutorial strategy, delaying proceedings, and creating procedural vulnerabilities precisely in those cases where institutional robustness is most needed.

The current case portfolio of the TOK underscores why personnel discontinuity matters. The office handles high-level corruption cases and, among other matters, pursued the investigation into Culture Minister Nikola Selaković in the “General Staff” case. It is also responsible for investigating corruption charges in the fatal canopy collapse at the Novi Sad railway station in November 2024, a focal point of public outrage and a catalyst for sustained protests against the government, with widespread suspicion that systemic corruption in major infrastructure projects has contributed to the tragedy. Restructuring a specialised prosecutorial body while it is handling politically sensitive investigations risks blurring the line between neutral administrative reform and functional interference.

This mechanism represents a paradigmatic example of neutralisation through reassignment. Rather than directly removing prosecutors, an approach that would trigger visible international scrutiny and citizens’ outrage, the legislature has opted for a formally lawful restructuring that nonetheless can still produce effects functionally comparable to a partial institutional purge.

Officially, the reforms are justified as measures to improve efficiency and coherence and to address perceived dysfunction within specialised prosecutorial bodies. Yet, considering the politically sensitive environment and the nature of the cases they currently handle, the reforms carry clear hallmarks of subverting the rule of law.

Formal compliance and functional erosion

One of the most striking features of the “Mrdić laws” is not merely their formal restraint but their sustained insistence on ostensibly technical adjustments that, in practice, significantly recalibrate the balance of power within the justice system.

Contemporary rule-of-law erosion increasingly operates through compliance-preserving subversion: maintaining the outward form of independent institutions while altering their internal operating environment to reduce their competencies effectively. The Serbian reforms fit squarely within this emerging pattern.

EU conditionality and the problem of grey-zone reforms

The European Union has already expressed concerns over the amendments, framing them as a potential step backwards in Serbia’s accession trajectory. Yet the episode also exposes the structural limits of existing rule-of-law monitoring frameworks.

EU conditionality mechanisms focus heavily on formal legal compliance: constitutional guarantees and statutory alignment with international standards on paper. They struggle to identify reforms that preserve formal guarantees while effectively eroding operational independence. The Serbian case thus reinforces the need for rule-of-law assessment tools that assess institutional reforms more functionally and can detect institutional neutralisation by design. It simultaneously underscores the structural limits of a centre–periphery model of EU rule-of-law promotion that privileges formal convergence over functional scrutiny.

The Venice Commission is said to prepare its opinion on the reform package, which will hopefully provide a more granular analytical framework for assessing the cumulative impact of these changes on the functioning of the Serbian judiciary.

Institutional re-engineering and the changing logic of capture

The “Mrdić laws” illustrate the evolving grammar of rule-of-law erosion in contemporary hybrid regimes. Rather than openly dismantling prosecutorial independence, the Serbian legislature has pursued a more calibrated strategy: targeted restructuring, hierarchical consolidation, and large-scale personnel reshuffling.

Individually, many of the amendments can be presented as technical or efficiency-driven. Taken together, however, they stand to substantially erode the continuity and specialised capacity of Serbia’s anti-corruption prosecution at a particularly sensitive political juncture with potentially far-reaching implications for the country’s political trajectory.

For observers of democratic backsliding, the lesson is increasingly clear: today’s most consequential threats to prosecutorial and judicial independence rarely come through overt dismissal or formal constitutional overhaul. Instead, they materialise through calibrated institutional redesign that preserves legal form while shifting the underlying distribution of power.

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On 6 February 2026, the European Commission disclosed its long-awaited preliminary findings regarding its investigation into whether TikTok, the social media platform used by 170 million people across the European Union, is in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA). This marks an important step in the formal proceedings which were initiated in 2024. The announcement occurs at a time when political and public concerns about the potential harmful impact of social media platforms are at an all-time high, leading to calls to “ban” children and teenagers from those spaces in countries across the world.  As “addictive” features are central to concerns leading to these contested calls, the potential of the Digital Services Act to change platform design is crucial.

What did the European Commission find in its TikTok investigation?

The Commission’s investigation finds that TikTok’s addictive design might violate the Digital Services Act. According to the Commission, TikTok failed to conduct an adequate risk assessment and evaluate how addictive design features, including infinite scrolling, autoplay, push notifications and a highly personalised recommender system, could harm the physical and mental well-being of its users, specifically minors and vulnerable adults.

Particularly, the Commission claims that the app’s design fuels the urge to keep scrolling and shifts users’ brains into an “autopilot mode” by continuously rewarding users with new content. The Commission also alleges that TikTok ignored certain indicators of compulsive use, such as how frequently users open the app and the amount of time minors spend on it at night. In this regard, it has been claimed by an EU spokesperson that TikTok is by far the most-used platform after midnight by children between the ages of 13 and 18.

The preliminary findings further accuse TikTok of implementing inadequate risk mitigation measures. According to the Commission, current measures such as screentime management and parental control tools fail to effectively reduce the risks stemming from the platform’s addictive design.

To meaningfully comply with the DSA and ultimately make the app less addictive for users, the Commission states that TikTok will have to change its basic design. The preliminary findings suggest disabling the “infinite scroll” feature, implementing effective “screen time breaks”, including at night, and adapting the recommender system.

So far, the preliminary findings, which the Commission clarified as being the result of “an analysis of TikTok’s risk assessments reports, internal data and documents and TikTok’s responses to multiple requests for information, a review of the extensive scientific research on this topic, and interviews with experts in multiple fields”, have not been published. This is expected to happen in the near future, after the redaction of the findings.

How does the DSA tackle the addictive design of Very Large Online Platforms?

Whereas the Commission’s press release does not refer to specific articles of the DSA that they assess as being breached, the breach appears to be linked to articles 34 and 35 DSA, as well as article 28 DSA.

Articles 34 and 35 DSA are applicable to so-called Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs). A platform is designated as a VLOP by the Commission when it reaches 45 million or more monthly active users in the EU – a threshold TikTok clearly exceeds. Article 34 requires VLOPs to undertake a yearly assessment of the systemic risks in the EU stemming from the design, functioning or use of their service. Such systemic risks include:

a) the dissemination of illegal content;

b) any actual or foreseeable negative effects for the exercise of fundamental rights (including the rights of the child);

c) any actual or foreseeable negative effects on civic discourse and electoral processes, and public security; and

d) any actual or foreseeable negative effects in relation to gender-based violence, the protection of public health and minors and serious negative consequences to the person’s physical and mental well-being.

Addictive design features, such as the ones identified by the Commission, fall within the categories b) and d), especially in relation to their effects on children, as confirmed in recitals 81 and 83 of the DSA.

Following this risk assessment, Article 35 requires VLOPs to put in place reasonable, proportionate and effective mitigation measures, which are tailored to the specific systemic risks. Such measures may include, among others, adapting the design, features or functioning of the service, adapting the algorithmic and recommender system, and putting in place age verification and parental control tools. It is precisely these risk assessment and risk mitigation obligations that, in the Commission’s view, TikTok failed to adequately fulfil.

In addition, some of the features mentioned by the Commission in its press release are referred to quite extensively in the guidelines on Article 28 DSA, published by the Commission in July 2025 following a public consultation process. Article 28 DSA applies to all online platforms accessible to minors and requires them to ensure a high level of privacy, safety, and security for minors. To help platforms realise this rather abstract obligation, the guidelines list a wide range of measures that the Commission believes are needed. Relevant measures in light of the preliminary findings include, for instance, turning off autoplay of videos and push notifications by default (which should always be turned off during core sleep hours, adapted to the age of the minor) (para 57). In addition, minors must not be exposed to persuasive design features that are aimed predominantly at engagement, and that may lead to extensive use or overuse of the platform or problematic or compulsive behavioural habits. This includes the possibility of scrolling indefinitely, the automatic triggering of video content, and notifications artificially timed to regain minors’ attention (para 61). What should be available are child-friendly and effective time management tools to increase minors’ awareness of their time spent on online platforms (para 61).

What is interesting in the Commission’s press release is that they do not just refer to the potential harm for minors, but also for vulnerable adults. The Article 28 guidelines also pick up on this, stating that platforms are encouraged to adopt the measures for the purposes of protecting all users, not just minors. This reflects discussions that have been going on for some time in the area of consumer protection, arguing that vulnerability in the digital environment might be a universal state due to its design and specific characteristics. This is also central to plans for a forthcoming Digital Fairness Act. This legislative initiative aims to strengthen consumer protection online, addressing challenges such as addictive design and unfair personalisation practices. A proposal by the Commission is expected in 2026.

Or should we ban children from social media platforms?

The release of the Commission’s preliminary findings occurs at a time when governments across the EU are increasingly contemplating the introduction of what is commonly referred to as a ‘social media ban’. These initiatives typically involve setting a minimum age below which children should not be allowed to create an account on social media platforms. While such platforms already include in their terms and conditions that children under the age of 13 are not allowed on their platforms, in practice, this age limit is not adequately enforced. The recent calls for bans often propose raising this age to 15 or even 16 years. Politicians from a wide range of countries – including (but not limited to) Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain – are jumping on this bandwagon because of public debates on how children’s online activities may negatively impact their well-being and mental health. An important element in those debates concerns the addictive effect of platform features. They also often allude to the social media ban for under-16-year-olds which entered into force in Australia in December 2025, although it is far too soon to understand whether this is an effective way to address the concerns.

These initiatives in EU Member States raise interesting legal questions. The Digital Services Act is a full harmonisation instrument, which means that Member States should not adopt or maintain additional national requirements relating to the matters falling within the scope of the DSA (recital 9). Although the DSA offers Member States some leeway to apply “other national legislation […] where the provisions of national law pursue other legitimate public interest objectives than those pursued” by the DSA, this leeway is limited. Relying on article 3(4) of the E-Commerce Directive, for instance, could allow for national provisions that aim to protect minors or public health for a “given information society service”. Yet, these aims hardly qualify as other legitimate public interest objectives as they are central to articles 28 and 34 DSA. Moreover, in Google Ireland, Meta Platforms, TikTok v. Kommaustria, the Court of Justice of the EU clarified that “general and abstract measures aimed at a category of given information society services described in general terms and applying without distinction to any provider of that category of services do not fall within the concept of measures taken against a ‘given information society service’ within the meaning of that provision” (para 58).

The way in which a Member State would formulate a ‘social media ban’ is thus important. This was confirmed by the French Council of State in its advice on the French legislative proposal, stating that imposing the prohibition on accessing social networks on the online platforms themselves could be seen as raising difficulties regarding the DSA, but that imposing this obligation on minors under the age of fifteen would not contravene EU law. This follows the interpretation by the Commission, found in the minutes of a meeting of the Working Group on protection of minors of the European Board of Digital Services, that “member states can set social policy measures for minimum age access, but not additional obligations on online platforms”. This national minimum age should then simply be enforced by the platforms in the context of the obligations they have under the DSA, and age assurance – mandated by the article 28 Guidelines – in particular.

Whereas it could be debated whether this was indeed a scenario originally anticipated by the EU legislator, it remains a fact that the DSA aimed to harmonise the protection of minors on platforms across EU Member States. This conflicts with a scenario where children would be allowed to engage with social media at different ages across different countries. In its November 2025 report, the European Parliament called for the establishment of a harmonised EU digital age limit for social media: 16 as the general rule, unless parents or guardians give permission, and 13 as an absolute minimum below which no child should have access to such platforms. President von der Leyen announced the creation of an expert panel tasked with developing a recommendation for an EU “digital age of majority”. According to reports, the group has been formed, and its work will be launched soon. It is crucial that a decision on this issue is evidence-based and considers the view of children themselves.

In the debate on social media bans, arguments that a ban might negatively affect children’s rights have also been raised. Not allowing children of certain ages to be present in these spaces is often seen as a simplistic answer for a complex problem which creates a false sense of security. On top of that, bans take away incentives to effectively make the platforms better, not only for children but for everyone. This is why the European Commission’s preliminary findings on TikTok are especially important. They send a strong signal that addictive features, which are at the heart of the concerns, are not acceptable. Focussing on platform design – an area where the DSA has genuine regulatory potential – rather than simply preventing most children from being there, is arguably more sustainable in the long run.

What are the next steps?

The ball is now in TikTok’s court. It has the possibility to review the investigation files and exercise its right to defence. TikTok has already rejected the preliminary findings, asserting in a statement that “the Commission’s preliminary findings present a categorically false and entirely meritless depiction of our platform, and we will take whatever steps are necessary to challenge these findings through every means available to us”. If the action TikTok takes remains inadequate, and the Commission’s views are ultimately confirmed, the platform could face fines of up to 6% of the global annual turnover of its parent company ByteDance. One can be sceptical about the deterrent effect of (even large) fines on big tech companies. But at this moment, the hope that strong enforcement of the DSA may succeed in changing the design of the platforms for the better remains intact.

Disclaimer: Valerie Verdoodt’s contribution to this blogpost was funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. This work is supported by ERC grant KIDFLUENCER (101169786, 10.3030/101169786).”

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