In the last three years, marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, TikTok has emerged as a global platform, attracting hundreds of millions of children and young people. TikTok’s For You page and the algorithmic recommender system behind it have played a crucial role in catapulting the platform to its current ubiquity in children’s and young people’s lives.

This report focuses on the user surveillance, design decisions and personalised content recommendations employed by TikTok in the pursuit of 'user engagement' — and their detrimental real-world impact on children and young people.

Amnesty International’s research shows that TikTok has maximized the addictive qualities of design choices and engagement strategies employed by competing social media companies, incentivising a race to the bottom between a small number of leading social media companies vying for the highest user numbers and engagement rates. TikTok has done this in spite of mounting scientific evidence of the serious risks associated with addictive use of social media especially for children and young people’s health, including sleep and attention problems and even changes in brain structure similar to those observed in people experiencing drug addiction.