Brazil's National Data Protection Authority, known by its Portuguese acronym ANPD, fined TikTok parent company ByteDance 153.7 million reais—equivalent to $29.9 million—on Tuesday for failing to put adequate child safety protections in place on the platform. Enforcement director Fabricio Lopes announced the decision at a press conference, saying TikTok had not taken necessary steps to block adolescents from accessing the platform and had allowed their personal data to be processed and used to serve them advertisements.
The ANPD simultaneously ordered ByteDance to delete all data gathered in breach of Brazilian regulations. The fine covers conduct that the agency determined put children and teenagers at risk through commercial data collection practices that Brazilian law prohibits without explicit parental consent.
Lopes framed the penalty as a warning to other social media platforms. He said the ANPD hoped they would recognize the 153.7 million reais figure as a signal about how seriously the agency takes its mandate.
ANPD director Lorena Giuberti Coutinho said the agency last week opened proceedings to check whether 22 social media networks and platforms comply with a law passed this year to protect children and teenagers online. She said stronger enforcement action should be expected in coming months.
TikTok has ten days to appeal the fine. Separately, TikTok agreed last week to pay $400 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, which alleged the video-sharing platform collected children's personal data without parental permission—a parallel enforcement action covering similar conduct.
TikTok said in a statement the Brazilian fine originates from complaints raised in 2021 and does not account for measures the company has implemented since then. The platform said it has rolled out more than 50 safety features for teenagers over the past six years, including blocking direct messages for users under 16, preventing its algorithm from recommending content from that age group to unknown accounts, and giving parents tools to set screen-time limits and restrict contact with other users.
As part of the ruling, TikTok agreed to suspend all advertising to users who are not logged in and to automatically apply stricter default privacy settings to accounts belonging to children under 16. The platform also committed to reinforcing parental supervision tools and applying tighter content filters. Coutinho said TikTok committed to implementing a formal compliance plan to improve protections for minors, describing those commitments as binding obligations running alongside the financial penalty.
The TikTok action reflects a sharper regulatory posture Brazil has taken toward large social media companies. The country requires that accounts held by users under 16 be linked to a parent's account and has moved against multiple platforms for failures to protect minors and suppress harmful content.
This month the ANPD ordered Discord, the popular streaming and messaging platform, to suspend livestreams and video calls after a teenage girl was allegedly encouraged to end her own life during a broadcast on the service. Discord filed an appeal against that suspension order on Monday; the ANPD confirmed the appeal is under review.
Brazil's willingness to cut off platform features entirely was demonstrated in 2024, when Elon Musk's social media network X was blocked for 40 days after the company refused to comply with orders from Brazil's Supreme Court to remove certain accounts. The blockade was lifted only after X agreed to comply. That episode established that Brazilian regulators have the legal footing and political will to impose operational restrictions on platforms that resist their directives.
The 22-platform compliance review now underway covers a broad cross-section of the social media industry. Coutinho's statement that far more aggressive enforcement should follow in coming months suggests the TikTok penalty is an opening move in a wider campaign.
