In November 2023, Amnesty International published a damning report highlighting how easily children and young people expressing an interest in mental health could be drawn into “rabbit holes” of depressive and suicidal content in TikTok’s ‘For You’ feed. The research revealed how TikTok employs addictive platform design to maximize engagement, undermining the right to privacy, freedom of thought and mental and physical health.
Since then, Amnesty International, together with young people from Argentina to Ireland, Kenya and Pakistan, has been campaigning for change. More than 125,000 people have signed a petition calling on TikTok to make the platform safer. And yet, whilst regulators are all too slowly beginning to tackle the harms of the Big Tech industry, TikTok is still failing to address its addictive design and its harmful “rabbit holes,” prioritizing profits over children’s safety.
Nowhere did Amnesty International’s global campaign attract as much support and public debate as in France. For all too many young people and their families, these harms were not abstract, they were – and are – their lived experience. Between 2024 and 2025, eleven French families joined a class action lawsuit against TikTok to establish, and seek accountability for, the company’s responsibility for the deterioration of their children’s mental and physical health, including a contributing role in the deaths of 15-year-old Marie Le Tiec and Charlize Dapui-Parkiet.
This follow-up report brings together testimony from some of these families and young survivors and renewed qualitative and quantitative evidence of TikTok’s continued failure to address the risks and harms of its business model.
The evidence presented in this briefing documents TikTok’s failure to address its systemic design risks for children and young people both under international business and human rights standards as well as under the company’s binding obligations under the EU’s Digital Services Act. It is an urgent appeal to the company itself, but also to EU and French regulators to take decisive action to force the company to respect children’s and human rights to privacy, freedom of thought and health.
Amnesty International shared its key findings with TikTok and offered it the opportunity to comment, but the company did not provide a response ahead of publication.