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The Ban and the Fine

Governments on five continents have stopped debating whether the algorithm is a policy problem. The world has sorted itself into three camps. This part maps the two that acted.

Tinsel Staff · · 8 min read
The Reckoning, Part One: The Ban and the Fine — a grid of squares in three groups, black for prohibition, red for regulation, pale for the countries looking away

THE RECKONING · Part One of a two-part series on how the world’s governments turned on the algorithm, and the question that turned them: how do we protect our children.

EDITOR’S NOTE

This series began with questions raised by Kenneth W. Welch Jr. and the team at Moxie Media Marketing. The reporting, sourcing, and conclusions are Tinsel’s own. Mr. Welch has asked to be on record that he stands behind the questions raised here, and behind the question at the center of the series: how do we protect our children. “It is the only question that matters,” Mr. Welch says. “Everything in these pages is the world starting to answer it.”

In December 2024, the prime minister of Albania stood in front of parents and teachers and reduced the entire global argument over social media to a single sentence. "Either TikTok protects the children of Albania," Edi Rama said, "or Albania will protect its children from TikTok." Strip away the geography and that is the sentence now being spoken, in statute and in court filings, by governments on five continents. Whether the world's most powerful recommendation algorithms are a matter for public policy is settled; the remaining argument is over what kind. And on that argument, the world has quietly sorted itself into three camps: the countries that banned, the countries that regulate, and the countries still looking away. This part maps the first two. The third, and what it costs, is Part Two.

Before the map comes the reason for it. What moved governments was a record. When a redaction error in Kentucky's lawsuit briefly exposed TikTok's internal research in 2024, reporters at NPR and Kentucky Public Radio read documents showing the company had calculated that a user can form a habit after watching 260 videos, which the state's investigators noted works out to under 35 minutes on the app, alongside internal language describing compulsive use as correlated with "a slew of negative mental health effects." A federal appeals court ruled in 2024, in a case brought by the mother of a ten-year-old girl who died attempting a challenge the suit says her feed had served her, that a platform's algorithmic recommendations are its own expressive activity, outside the legal shield that has protected internet companies for a generation. A London coroner had already concluded in 2022 that fourteen-year-old Molly Russell died from self-harm "while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content," the first finding of its kind, delivered about Instagram and Pinterest, which put every platform on notice. And British regulators found that 73 percent of children aged 11 to 17 had encountered potentially harmful content online within a single month, with TikTok the most-cited source among secondary-school children who saw it. These are filings, rulings, and government research. TikTok disputes the characterizations and points to its published teen safeguards; the disputes now happen inside courtrooms and regulators' offices.

The first camp reached for the off switch. India went first and went furthest: in June 2020 its technology ministry banned TikTok outright, on the stated grounds of "sovereignty and integrity," cutting off roughly 200 million users, then made the ban permanent in January 2021. Six years on, it holds, the largest and longest prohibition in the world. Others followed for their own reasons: Afghanistan in 2022, Somalia in 2023, and Kyrgyzstan, which wrote its restriction explicitly on a child-protection legal basis. Nepal banned the platform in late 2023 over "social harmony," then lifted the ban the following August once TikTok agreed to register locally. Albania followed through on Rama's sentence with a year-long ban that ran from March 2025, ended in February 2026 without renewal after the company agreed to new safeguards for minors, and was then ruled unconstitutional after the fact by the country's highest court. France blocked the app in New Caledonia for two weeks during a 2024 state of emergency, and its highest administrative court later held the block unlawful. The pattern inside this camp is worth stating plainly. In the democracies that tried prohibition, Nepal, Albania, France, Montana, the bans keep getting lifted, struck down, or negotiated away, and courts in America and Europe have said so; the prohibitions that hold belong to India and to governments that answer to no court. Prohibition turns out to be the bluntest tool on the table.

The American entry in this camp deserves its own paragraph, because it ended somewhere no other country has gone. Montana tried a state ban in 2023; a federal judge blocked it before it took effect, and it was never enforced. Congress then passed a federal law in April 2024 requiring TikTok's Chinese parent, ByteDance, to sell the platform's US operations or lose the American market. The Supreme Court upheld that law unanimously in January 2025, the app went dark for roughly fourteen hours, and after a year of executive extensions and negotiation, the endgame arrived this January: TikTok's US business closed into a new joint venture in which Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi's MGX hold roughly 15 percent each and ByteDance retains 19.9 percent, with US user data and a retrained copy of the algorithm operated inside Oracle's American cloud. Analysts still contest how much the arrangement truly severs, and the deal's full terms have not been made public. But the structural fact stands alone in the world: the United States used law to force the partial surrender of the algorithm's ownership. Alongside all of this runs a quieter tier of prohibition: the staff-device bans adopted in 2023 by the European Commission, Parliament, and Council and by NATO for its issued devices, which say in effect that whatever the app is, officials should not carry it into the building.

The second camp decided the platform can stay and the design cannot. This is where the heaviest machinery now operates. Australia built the world's first age wall: a law that since December 10, 2025 requires platforms, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, X, and their peers, to take reasonable steps to keep under-16s from holding accounts, on penalty of fines up to 49.5 million Australian dollars. In its first weeks, platforms restricted about 4.7 million Australian accounts. The regulator's own early evaluation found that more than 80 percent of children still reach at least one restricted platform, a candor worth respecting, because it shows a government measuring its own wall and reinforcing it rather than declaring victory. Britain's Online Safety Act put its children's codes into force in July 2025, and this July the regulator opened a formal investigation into TikTok, saying it has "serious doubts" about whether the platform's age checks actually detect children. That inquiry is open, not decided, and the fine on the table runs to 10 percent of qualifying global revenue.

The European Union went after the design itself. Its Digital Services Act proceedings against TikTok, opened in 2024, have already produced permanent structural concessions: the company withdrew its TikTok Lite rewards program from Europe forever, under binding commitments, after Brussels moved against a feature that paid users to keep watching, and in late 2025 it committed to rebuild its advertising-transparency repository to close a second case. In February of this year the Commission issued preliminary findings that TikTok's core design, infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, the personalized recommender, breaches the DSA, writing that the company "did not adequately assess how these addictive features could harm the physical and mental wellbeing of its users." In July came a second set: minors' accounts can be set to public visibility the law says they should not have. Both are preliminary, and no DSA fine has yet been imposed; the exposure if the findings are confirmed runs to 6 percent of worldwide turnover. The per-country ledger fills in around it. Ireland, the platform's European regulator of record, fined TikTok €345 million in 2023 over children's data and €530 million in 2025 over transfers of European data to China, with appeals continuing. Italy's competition authority fined the company €10 million over inadequate safeguards against content endangering minors, in a case sparked by the "French scar" challenge. France's National Assembly ran a full commission of inquiry into TikTok's psychological effects on minors and recommended, among 43 measures, banning social media for children under 15. This July, parliament went further than its own report: France became the first country in the European Union to pass a blanket under-15 social media ban, approved 279 to 81 in the National Assembly, with new accounts blocked from September 1 and existing ones from January 2027. A Paris prosecutor has separately opened a criminal investigation into the platform's handling of suicide-related content. And in the United States, the regulatory track has run beside the ownership fight: suits by more than a dozen state attorneys general alleging addictive design have survived TikTok's motions to dismiss in state after state, and on August 22 the Justice Department announced a $400 million settlement resolving the federal children's-privacy case, one of the largest such recoveries in American history. Where nothing has been settled or ruled upon, it remains allegation.

There is one more regulator to put on this map, and it belongs at the end because it reframes everything above it. Some of the tightest published limits anywhere for the algorithm's home-grown sibling were written in the country that built it. Douyin, ByteDance's domestic Chinese app, announced in 2021 that users verified as under 14 are placed in a youth mode they cannot exit: 40 minutes a day, accessible only between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., with a curated feed the company says favors science experiments, museum exhibits, and educational content. China's regulators went further, capping minors' online gaming at roughly three hours a week and building a device-level "minors' mode" with default daily limits by age band and a 10 p.m. blackout. The honest caveats belong in the same breath: the rules bind only real-name-verified children, the minors' mode is guidance that parents activate rather than a compulsory law, and Douyin and TikTok are separate apps for separate markets. But set the two rulebooks side by side, a non-exitable 40-minute cap on one side, and on the other a 60-minute default that a teenager can dismiss with a passcode, and the American technologist Tristan Harris put the contrast in an advocate's terms on 60 Minutes: ByteDance, he said, makes "their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world." That is advocacy, and the two-rulebook fact underneath it is not in dispute. By its own published rules, the algorithm's home country keeps its own children on the shortest leash.

Two camps, then: prohibition and forced redesign, with the world's largest democracy in the first and most of the West in the second. The third camp is the rest of the map, the governments that have watched all of the above and, so far, done nothing. What that stillness looks like up close, what it costs, and where all three camps are heading, is Part Two.

Sources

Next in the series: Part Two, The Countries Looking Away, published today.

Tinsel Staff

Tinsel Staff

Tinsel Magazine's editorial staff reports on culture, entertainment, fashion, internet, art, and style — with an LA lens and an eye for the structural stories most outlets miss. Writers and contributors join us by pitch: contributors@tinselmag.com.

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