MADRID — Trailing in the polls ahead of Nov. 29 national elections, Spain’s ruling Socialist Party is turning to TikTok. Not to use it, but to try to ban it. 

Following the publication on Monday of a Spanish investigation accusing TikTok of allowing child sexual abuse material, the youth ministry announced it would try to block the platform.

On Wednesday the prosecutor’s office opened a preliminary inquiry, prompting a triumphant post on X by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. “Great news,” he wrote. “The days of impunity on social media are over. No platform is above the law, and much less above the rights of our children.”

The bombshell report by civil society group Maldita has shocked Spain and given the government a chance to show it’s tough on Big Tech just ahead of a momentous election, with polls showing the right firmly ahead.

Over the past 72 hours the government has pulled every available legal lever against TikTok, including lodging cases with both the Data Protection Agency and the public prosecutor’s office.

The reality that EU legal thresholds for shutting off open platforms are relatively high isn’t slowing the public onslaught. In a TV interview aired Monday after Maldita’s investigation was released, Sánchez cast his government as a bulwark against Big Tech. “If we have to suspend a social media platform in Spain, have no doubt that we’ll do so,” he said.

TikTok says the company moved quickly to identify and remove content after the Maldita report was published. “CSAM (child sexual abuse material) is categorically prohibited on our platform, and we deploy advanced detection technologies alongside a dedicated Child Safety Team to aggressively identify and eliminate it,” a TikTok spokesperson said. “As bad actors continuously adapt their tactics, we work tirelessly to improve our safeguards.”

Sánchez has every reason to turn the conversation toward protecting children and holding foreign tech companies accountable after sagging in the polls following last month’s train crash in Toledo that killed 69 people. The Socialist leader explained this week that his government was pushing to enforce the “criminal liability of the leaders of these platforms.”

Still, the points Sánchez is looking to score by targeting Big Tech may be limited because his main opponent also slammed TikTok for failing to act.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the conservative People’s Party and current favorite to be Spain’s next prime minister, met on Tuesday with Maldita’s team. “It’s shocking, and we can’t look the other way,” he wrote on X. “We have a duty to protect children, and this is one of my top priorities for families.” 

Borja Sémper, a key PP lawmaker who attended the meeting between Feijóo and the investigative team, said: “What’s happening on TikTok is unacceptable. We’re not going to let this go.”

The Socialist Party has positioned itself as Spain’s toughest voice against the platforms, and Sánchez has made clashes with “techno-oligarchs” a key campaign calling card. 

A spokesperson for Spain’s digital ministry pointed to the PP and the far-right Vox as partly responsible for the inaction over TikTok, given that they voted against the government’s designation of the National Markets and Competition Commission as the regulator of digital services. By rejecting the motion, the spokesperson said, they deprived the state of “the tools to protect our children.”

Earlier this week, Youth Minister Sira Rego asked the country’s data protection watchdog to suspend TikTok. “If it were up to us, TikTok would have been shut down from the very moment we learned of the investigation,” said a ministry official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the issue. “But we don’t have the authority to do so.” 

The same official said the Ministry of Youth and Children had met with Spain’s TikTok team but hadn’t received a satisfactory response. “We asked them to voluntarily suspend their services in Spain,” the official said, adding the platform had only agreed to “look into it” without providing a timeline.

Bans are hard

The only way for the Spanish government to force a suspension of the service is to get a court order. The ministry has written to the State Attorney General’s Office to open an investigation that could lead to a suspension of operations, the official said. 

In 2024, Spanish judge Santiago Pedraz ordered Telegram to be blocked for three days before reversing his decision, ruling that the measure wasn’t proportionate. The precedent is there, and shows that although a ban is possible, it is also unlikely.

The current Spanish push isn’t the first time a European government facing tough elections has floated suspending an online platform in response to illegal content.

Just last month, the French government touted the suspension of social media amid widespread protests, but a constitutional court partly struck it down, saying it wasn’t in line with French law. Back in 2025 the Albanian government banned TikTok for just over a year, citing concerns over violence among children, although opposition parties accused the administration of trying to stifle criticism ahead of general elections.

But the constitutions of EU countries and bloc-wide rules don’t easily allow such measures. Laws to regulate big online platforms like TikTok are harmonized across the EU, which significantly limits what Madrid can do alone. 

The EU’s privacy rulebook, the General Data Protection Regulation, is enforced by national regulators. Ireland’s data protection authority oversees TikTok, which means the Youth Ministry’s request to Spain’s privacy regulator, the AEPD, is unlikely to go far. 

The AEPD cannot impose a permanent TikTok ban in Spain, but it could trigger what’s known as an “urgency procedure” under the GDPR. 

The emergency measure allows a privacy regulator to impose legally binding measures domestically that can last up to three months, where there is “urgent need to act” to protect people’s privacy rights.

The AEPD said that Ireland’s privacy regulator is the main authority responsible for TikTok’s compliance with privacy rules and said it will “share all available information with the Irish authority” and other European privacy regulators. 

The regulator said it has asked Maldita for a list of links to alleged unlawful processing of minors’ data, and asked TikTok what it has done to take down the reported content. 

TikTok’s wider content moderation practices are regulated by the Digital Services Act, which gives the European Commission oversight powers over big platforms. Brussels already has several probes open against TikTok and has said in preliminary findings that the Chinese-owned platform breaches the rules by failing to protect minors and by designing an addictive service, although it hasn’t issued any fines.

BRUSSELS—The European Union should have a plan to respond to serious artificial intelligence incidents, two EU countries said ahead of a key Friday meeting of national leaders focused on AI.

In a letter seen by POLITICO, Finland and Estonia say the bloc “can still compete at the frontier” of AI by mobilizing capital and building up compute power, but this should go hand in hand with “governing it responsibly.”

The two countries, considered among Europe’s digital leaders, call for “EU-level arrangements for responding to serious AI incidents.”

AI safety and security are on Friday’s agenda of the first-ever European Council meeting devoted to the revolutionary new technology.

Concerns about whether Europe is prepared to respond to AI-powered threats have been picking up steam since a series of incidents this summer in which AI agents went rogue and hacked into other companies. Recent cyberattacks and revelations of coding vulnerabilities have also raised concerns that security systems must be better equipped for the arrival of artificial intelligence.

Hungary pushed for a network of national contact points in case AI model providers lose control of their models, in an October paper seen by POLITICO. The country also pushed for a team of “pre-vetted, security-cleared” independent evaluators who can be ahead of incidents.

The letter from Finland and Estonia called for investment in European frontier AI models “as an economic priority and as a foundation for Europe’s influence on the future of AI.”

The countries warn that Europe requires “independent capacity to evaluate the most advanced models and their safety and security risks.”

BRUSSELS — You know that customer-service bot that won’t let you cancel your subscription? The EU wants to kill it.  

With a new law presented Wednesday, the European Commission will take aim at the endless array of practices websites have used over the past 20 years to make more money from consumers.  

The Digital Fairness Act is the European response to a wider regulatory trend that has seen consumer authorities curb irksome and exploitative practices. These include dynamic pricing that changes ticket prices based on demand, cumbersome processes for canceling subscriptions and the near-complete surrender of customer service to automated systems.  

According to a draft of the DFA obtained by POLITICO, the Commission will address several aspects of the design, service and terms under which businesses interact with consumers online. 

“Europe should not accept a digital economy where profits depend on exploiting people’s vulnerabilities,” Spanish socialist lawmaker Laura Ballarín Cereza, a key European lawmaker on tech legislation, said in a statement.

Industry leaders have pushed back on this potential new rulebook ever since the EU executive began considering a revision of consumer law in 2022. They say current consumer protection and digital services laws already cover these practices. “Where existing rules already cover a practice, it should not be regulated or enforced a second time,” said Ben Brake, director general of tech lobby DOT Europe.  

Consumer groups say existing rules, some dating back to 2005, are not clear enough and that many unfair design practices are still rampant.  

The Commission would have the power to impose fines of up to 6% of global annual revenue for companies that violate the new law. Those penalties are similar to fines levied under the Digital Services Act, the EU’s platform rules meant to stop Big Tech platforms from provoking systemic, society-wide harms through everything from election interference to keeping minors away from violent content. The new law instead would apply to any business offering services to EU consumers online. 

Dark patterns

The DFA would ban deceptive design known as “dark patterns,” which manipulate consumers through the use of such tactics as bright-colored buttons placed prominently to get customers to buy something. It also aims to ban personalized pricing that targets vulnerable consumers, including minors.  

The practice of dynamic pricing is also targeted in the law. That’s when a seller adjusts the price based on conditions such as demand or a user’s location, and it is commonly used in the sale of concert and airline tickets. The proposed law requires transparency when customers are buying products whose prices are subject to change.  

The DFA also covers consumer rights around “agentic commerce,” when artificial intelligence agents are used to find and complete purchases. 

Four lawmakers from the conservative, socialist and liberal groups said the requirement doesn’t go far enough and that the DFA should completely ban dynamic pricing for cultural and sporting events, according to a letter obtained by POLITICO. 

Sellers offering subscriptions will have to provide an easy way to cancel, reminiscent of New York State’s “click to cancel” rules. The new EU rules also require that a human is available for after-sales customer support.  

The rules also address, for the first time, specific aspects of online gaming, including bans on video games that allow kids to pay to succeed and progress in the game.  

The DFA is also trying to make its mark on what is known as “addictive design” of online platforms. This has already been the target of enforcement action in Europe and litigation in the U.S. in cases involving minors. But the new consumer rules would apply to adults as well, requiring online platforms to offer an opt-out from addictive features like autoplay.  

Spain’s Ballarín Cereza thinks this is not enough, saying users should be opted out of these features by default. “Why should consumers carry the burden when companies deliberately design these addictive mechanisms? We must shift from consumer responsibility to corporate responsibility: safety and fairness must be the default, not an option,” she said. 

PARIS — French Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot said Iran was behind the recent series of “unprecedented” cyberattacks on refrigerators in several major supermarket chains in the country last month.

“Thanks to the outstanding work of the government departments, I am able to confirm that responsibility for this attack lies with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards,” Barrot told reporters Monday at a G7 meeting in Paris. “We will impose sanctions at European level against those responsible.”

Barrot said that 700 food distribution sites in France were impacted in the cyberattack. French prosecutors said shortly after that they were opening an investigation into the hacks.

Though Barrot was only referring to the incidents reported in France, grocery stores across Europe and even French blood banks have been targeted by hackers in recent days. Cyber experts had previously raised concerns that the attacks may have been part of Russia’s ongoing hybrid warfare against Europe, though the Kremlin has denied any involvement.

In a statement, a spokesperson for France’s foreign affairs ministry said the French investigation found that Iran’s cyber unit, Shahid Kaveh, carried out the destructive attacks. Shahid Kaveh, which is linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, carries out offensive cyber operations.

The French investigation will focus on the unit’s head, the Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement, adding that about 20 fires had been started because of the cyberattack.

“The attackers took remote control of the equipment via web interfaces to trigger abnormal defrost cycles of unlimited duration, while disabling the security alerts on the sensors that were supposed to activate once a certain temperature was exceeded,” it added.

“We just heard now that [the cyberattacks] were attributed to Iran,” European Council President Kaja Kallas said after Barrot’s statement, adding that the matter would be discussed at next week’s European foreign affairs council. If the attribution is confirmed, she said, “[Europe’s] response should be strong.”

The European Commission is also looking into these cyberattacks, which EU Agriculture and Food Commissioner Christophe Hansen described as a “deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain.”

Iran’s foreign affairs ministry and its embassy in Paris did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

This story has been updated.

BRUSSELS — At least 15 European flights were targeted by bomb threats Thursday, following seven similar incidents earlier in the week in which authorities found no explosives.

Irish airline Aer Lingus reported that one of its flights from Dublin to Rome was diverted to an airport in France following a security threat.

The office of French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said that the plane landed safely in Évreux, northwest of Paris, and that the 157 people on board were taken to safety.

According to the BBC, two other flights were diverted Thursday following similar alerts: a Wizz Air plane from Milan to Warsaw, which was diverted to Vienna; and a Ryanair flight from London to Sofia, which was diverted to Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

Finnish carrier Finnair said that two of its aircraft — both departing from Helsinki and bound for Rome and Vienna — faced “faced unfounded or hoax bomb threats” and were subject to police checks after landing. The plane bound for Rome was also escorted by Italian fighter jets.

“Unfortunately, air traffic is sometimes subject to threats, as we have seen this week, when also other airlines in Europe have faced hoax bomb threats,” said spokesperson Päivyt Tallqvist.

Another bomb threat affected a flight operated by LOT from Warsaw to Brussels Airport on Thursday morning. Airport spokesperson Ihsane Chioua Lekhli told Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad that police carried out searches and no further security measures were deemed necessary.

LOT said that another aircraft scheduled to fly from Warsaw to Paris “was stopped while taxiing and directed to a designated parking stand” before departure.

“The aircraft and all baggage underwent a security screening,” said the airline, which added that no hazardous items were found and that the flight departed with a replacement aircraft.

Italian news agency ANSA reported that two flights bound for Milan Malpensa Airport — an Aegean Airlines flight from Thessaloniki and a Ryanair flight from Porto — were also searched following bomb threats.

Two other Ryanair flights bound for Sofia — one from Copenhagen and the other from Madrid — were also reportedly targeted by bomb threats.

Czech police said on social media that four flights bound for Prague Airport were also threatened, but officers assessed “the severity of the threats as low.”

Ben Smith, CEO of Air France–KLM, said that the threats were happening “in a coordinated way.”

“I don’t think we’ve seen this before,” he said during a Thursday earnings call, but added that the airline group is not making any requests of governments. “We’re quite confident that we have in place what we need to ensure that it has minimal or no impact on our operations.”

EU Transport Commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas said: “It is too early to draw conclusions on whether the reported incidents are linked.”

He added that the EU-level information sharing mechanism for aviation security has been activated. “We don’t have information yet whether this is a cyber attack,” he said.

EU Aviation Safety Agency spokesperson Janet Northcote said: “The immediate safety threat from individual hoax threats is low. However, the higher number of diversions places an additional strain on the system.”

Seven passenger aircraft were searched on Monday and Tuesday by authorities in Spain, Poland, Italy and Bulgaria following bomb threats. No explosives were found, but the alerts also led to the temporary closure of Warsaw Chopin Airport.

The risk of someone successfully smuggling a bomb aboard an airplane is low, said Jan-Arwed Richter, CEO of JACDEC, an aviation-safety analysis firm.

“Today there is hardly any thinkable way to get explosives aboard a commercial flight,” he said. “The last real bombing of a flight took place on Oct. 31, 2015 on a flight from Egypt to Russia because of security loopholes and personnel shortcomings that were rectified immediately.”

This article has been updated.

BRUSSELS — Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will visit the European Parliament next week to discuss online child safety, according to an email sent to lawmakers and seen by POLITICO.

Visiting Brussels for the first time as a couple, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will on Tuesday join Parliament President Roberta Metsola in opening an exhibition honoring “the memory of children whose lives were lost in connection with online harms.”

Prince Harry will then discuss with Commissioner Dubravka Šuica, experts and lawmakers “how we can turn legislative commitments into effective safeguards for children, including through safer design, stronger enforcement, and clear accountability for technology companies,” the email reads.

The event is being hosted by Spanish center-right lawmaker Antonio López-Istúriz White, who is the vice president of the Parliament’s intergroup on children’s rights. In September, the European Commission proposed the EU Kids Act, which includes restrictions on social media use for minors.

“The decisions we take on AI, platform design and the enforcement of online safeguards will shape the digital environments in which children grow up. This responsibility cuts across parliamentary committees and policy areas; the experiences of children and families should inform and guide our work throughout,” Lopéz wrote in his invitation to other lawmakers.

BRUSSELS — The Make America Healthy Again crusade against Big Food is crossing the Atlantic.

Donald Trump’s health secretary has made packaged, mass-produced munchies one of the targets of his health agenda. And while Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s broadsides against vaccines have alarmed Brussels he has found an ally in the European Commission on this pillar of the MAHA mission.

Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi — former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s man in Brussels — has backed Kennedy’s push, saying Europe and the U.S. share an ambition to tackle unhealthy diets. 

“I welcome the US – including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – putting a stronger spotlight on this agenda including the #eatrealfood campaign,” Várhelyi wrote on LinkedIn after his appearance at the USA-EU Transatlantic Business Summit in Brussels earlier this year.

But sharing an ambition is the easy part. Deciding what ultra-processed food is — and whether or how it should be regulated: not so much.

At the heart of the debate is a growing body of research linking UPFs to conditions such as obesity and diabetes, risks everyone says they want to reduce. But the challenge is translating that evidence into public health policy without dictating what people eat. 

For industry, the priority is protecting personal choice. For public health advocates, the problem is systemic. What appears to be an individual choice is often the result of inequality, they argue — influenced by income, education and a food environment that can make healthier options harder to access.

The issue has been pitting health advocates against Big Food companies on multiple continents for years now — but global momentum is moving toward regulation as the World Health Organization prepares to unveil new tools to help policymakers this week. 

The “million dollar question,” as health activist Liz Arnanz put it, is how to define ultra-processed foods. 

The term might bring to mind salty chips, preservative-filled pastries and sugary drinks, but that category can also include whole-grain bread or fortified yogurt.

“We are seeing a huge increase of deaths linked to unhealthy diets,” said Arnanz, of the NCD Alliance, an NGO fighting against noncommunicable diseases. Not only are UPFs usually “high in fats and sugar and sodium,” she argued, but there is also “an independent unhealthiness layer of the processing of food.”

Her last point is a controversial one, directly disputed by industry and up for debate among scientists. Where health advocates see cheap junk food that’s chemically engineered to be addictive, the industry can point to innovations that make products more nutritious, less expensive and safer to eat, for longer.

Echoes of the tobacco debate

For all the increasingly tough talk around UPFs from both Kennedy and Várhelyi, concrete regulation remains scarce in both Washington and Brussels. 

Latin America has arguably been the trailblazer, with Brazil a leading example. It became one of the first countries to explicitly tell its population to avoid UPFs, and backed this up with rules to limit them in schools. On the international level, the WHO is developing its own global guidance, with plans to present a food profiling tool intended to help governments decide on UPF regulations on Monday at an event in Nuremberg, Germany.

The global health body has come down hard on the UPF industry. It accused it in a 2024 report of using the same playbook as alcohol and tobacco industries “to influence entire systems,” from “political lobbying and spreading misinformation and disinformation in the media, to harmful financial practices, and targeted marketing strategies directed at children and young people.”

Connecting the consumption of processed foods with the tobacco and fossil fuel industries is “irresponsible and outrageously misleading,” said Rafael Sampson, a senior manager for public affairs at the trade association FoodDrinkEurope. The WHO report, he added, “ignores” that the science around UPFs remains contested.

Carrots or taxes

European health advocates are convinced that Brussels should act, but they’re divided over which tools to use — and how far to take the tobacco comparison. 

Suzy Sumner, who heads the Brussels office of the Foodwatch advocacy group, takes a page from the playbook against cigarettes and alcohol, backing taxes on junk food, marketing restrictions to children and front-of-pack labels. 

Marleen Kestens, manager for cardiovascular disease prevention policies at the European Heart Network, backs more positive incentives, adding that food should not be treated like tobacco.

“We would be much more in favor of subsidizing those products that people should consume more of, rather than having taxes on products that people should eat less,” Kestens said.

The Commission, meanwhile, is waiting for the results of a study on the potential health risks of UPFs, set to land in March 2027. Until then, it is reluctant to “prejudge the outcomes,” the Commission said in a statement to POLITICO. 

Despite a “growing body of evidence,” the statement said, “certain impacts (such as environmental and social) are less well explored at present.”

One thing that’s off the table: The Commission “of course has no intention to decide what citizens should eat or not,” the statement stressed. 

In fact, the Commission did flirt with using taxes to discourage people from buying unhealthy UPFs, in a leaked draft of its plan to tackle cardiovascular disease. But that dropped out of the final version. 

Instead, Várhelyi told MEPs early this year, the idea is to “use financial incentives to push the industry to reformulate the products” while trying to inform consumers about UPF health risks. 

Those types of policies are more likely to get buy-in from manufacturers. After all, the sector has already been working on both tasks “for decades,” said Sara Lamonaca, FoodDrinkEurope’s director of consumer information, nutrition and health.

The Commission’s caution on moving forward sits awkwardly with Europe’s deep-rooted resistance to food industrialization. Both at national and EU level, regulators have hardly shied away from limiting what ends up on citizens’ plates, from restrictions on genetically modified vegetables to a ban on selling plant-based meat substitutes under names like “veggie bacon.” 

“Regulating ultra-processed food and the food environments more broadly is something where the European region is lagging behind,” NCD Alliance’s Arnanz said.

America first

Even Washington has gone further than Brussels in turning words into action. The U.S. is currently moving toward a first definition of ultra-processed food. Back in January, Kennedy announced new dietary guidelines, warning Americans against highly processed foods and calling for a reduction in sugar intake.

“It’s beyond Europe now,” said Foodwatch’s Sumner. “It’s out of the box in a way now, and I think it’s going to be very difficult to try to pull back and say, ‘Oh, actually, no, there is no problem with these products at all.’”

The industry is adamant that the focus shouldn’t be on the P-word: “There is not enough evidence to use the level of processing as a basis for issuing dietary recommendations or public health policy,” Lamonaca said.

As the U.S. midterms and Brussels’ UPF study deadline draw closer, expect the lobbying to intensify on both sides of the Atlantic.

“The fight will be huge as usual,” said Kestens.