The article says the Irish agency is enforcing this for the entire EU. I think this is called the "one stop shop" solution which a lot of large foreign companies and Twitter use to avoid being fined by each member state individually. It also involves some closer oversight I think.
I'm explicitly saying Twitter not X Corp because Musk in his infamous wisdom fired everyone at Twitter Ireland who was involved in ensuring they remained compliant. I think part of the requirement was also that every feature launch is run past the Ireland team to make sure it doesn't violeate EU data laws. Musk has not done that for any of the changes he introduced since the leveraged buyout.
You've repeatedly claimed this fine is unbelievable, but that seems like a skill issue on your part. I have no trouble believing the reality of this fine. And tech corps should have no trouble believing it either. They better wisen up and respect the EU's laws if they think these fines are too large to bear (in reality, the worst violators can bear these fines just fine, and the EU should be issuing arrest warrants for the executives to make a real impact.)
The fines are escalatory. If Tiktok doesn’t wise up, the next one will _absolutely_ be bigger.
The reason you don’t hear about a lot of fines this size, is because most companies aren’t egregiously out of compliance and also correct things when first poked. TikTok did neither.
I suspect it's "unbelievable" because we are so used to fines being tiny "slaps on the wrist" that companies just treat as minor costs of doing business. Finally a real fine! When a company that makes $10B a year gets a fine of $100K, it's proportional to me getting a fine of $1. How is that effective?
Massive fines is the only deterrent for large corporations, it affects their bottom line, it can't be taken just as a cost to do business and ignored. When a corporation is on the hook for paying up to 4% of global revenue then the shareholders will care about not breaking the law.
>What next, we'll legislate away selling drugs to kids?
And that worked out great; drug use among kids nowadays is way higher than it was in past, the drug industry is larger than ever, and cartel violence is killing countless more kids in the third world than drugs ever killed.
That's not exactly true. China has a firewall which restricts access to the internet at large so you can't use Tiktok or Instagram for that matter in China. Tiktok and Douyin (Tiktok in China) are essentially the same app. Douyin has more features and of course since it's in China, more content control.
I would like the EU to focus on making laws that actually help us and move us forward. The EU can by the way introduce all sorts of ways to encourage parents to not buy their kids smartphones if they're too young to go on TikTok!
It's the *internet*. You can't regulate everything, it's not going to happen. If they have a smartphone, the kids will get out and explore it if they want to. No amount of GDPR laws and unbelievable penalties are going to stop that.
We need to get back to paper and pencil and the value of social skills. Or use a Chromebook in a sandbox if you must use tech.
