TikTok owner ByteDance could face a fine as large as 6% of global turnover if it refuses a European Union order to fix so-called “rabbit hole” algorithms that are designed to lure users into watching ever-more-targeted content, The Guardian reported.

On Friday, the European Commission (EC, the EU’s executive branch) said its investigation had determined that TikTok’s recommendation algorithm violates the Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires that big tech firms take actions to protect users from certain types of harm. While there’s no dispute about the legality of the specific content in question, the EC argued that TikTok hasn’t sufficiently assessed or addressed the harms that result from continually feeding it to users, like the exacerbation of mental or eating disorders. Think “thinspo” or “SkinnyTok,” the latter of which TikTok banned last year.

Regulators called out TikTok in particular for funneling young and/or vulnerable users towards content featuring topics like body image and isolation. The Guardian noted a recent survey by the Molly Rose Foundation, named after a 14-year-old whose father said Instagram led to her 2017 suicide, found almost half of girls and one third of all UK teenagers had seen social media content featuring suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders within the last week. An increasingly large body of research has associated rumination, or repetitive, hamster wheel-style thought loops dwelling on negative experiences and emotions, on social media with various harmful psychological outcomes.

The research is far from settled. One study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Computational Social Science Lab that attempted to model YouTube’s impact on users was published last year .

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