This week handed us a perfect diptych. On one side: The Verge reports that Facebook is testing a near-total overhaul to mimic TikTok's video-forward, algorithmically-driven feed. On the other: the European Commission formally warned TikTok that its child protections are opt-in rather than default, violating the Digital Services Act. The two stories seem separate. They are the same story.
The Race to the Engagement Bottom
When Facebook redesigns itself to chase TikTok's mechanics, it is not copying a product. It is adopting a philosophy: that the most addictive feed wins. That philosophy, when applied to minors, produces the exact failure mode the EU is now prosecuting. TikTok's child safety being opt-in is not an oversight. It is the logical consequence of building a system where every friction point, including age-appropriate defaults, is a risk to session time. Connor Hayes, VP of Threads at Meta, told Culture Slop that the challenge at scale is balancing deeply personal feeds with a billion-user ambition. Facebook's TikTok pivot suggests Meta's answer to that tension is to stop balancing it at all.
Default Settings Are Ideology
The EU's DSA argument is essentially a design argument: defaults are not neutral. Making child protection opt-in is a values statement. It says engagement is the baseline and safety is the exception you have to seek out. A 2024 paper in the Journal of Communication by Bail et al. on social media defaults found that the vast majority of users never alter platform defaults, making the out-of-box configuration the de facto policy for most people. Facebook cloning TikTok's feed while TikTok faces regulatory consequences for that feed's design is not irony. It is a roadmap being followed in real time.