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TikTok is under formal investigation over concerns it has failed to protect children from harmful content, the UK’s online regulator, Ofcom, has announced.
The social media platform’s approach to checking the ages of users has sparked “particular concerns” at the watchdog, almost a year after measures to protect children from the worst of online content came into effect under the Online Safety Act.
Ofcom said TikTok was using a method of inferring children’s ages that may have failed to correctly identify “a significant proportion of children”, putting them at risk of exposure to harmful content.
The regulator said it had not reached any conclusions, but that compliance failures could be punished with fines of up to £۱۸m or ۱۰% of qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater. Harmful content includes posts about disordered eating, self-harm, suicide and pornography. Ofcom can also apply to have sites blocked or restricted in the UK in the most serious cases.
Ofcom said: “This investigation will seek to establish whether there are reasonable grounds to believe that TikTok has failed, or is failing, to comply with its legal obligations … including by using age assurance that is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a particular user is a child.”
TikTok says it requires users to enter a date of birth when they create an account. “We also use technology that looks at information, often called ‘signals’, to check for indicators that someone may not meet our minimum age requirement,” it adds.
Meanwhile, the UK government is preparing to launch a social media ban for under-۱۶s early next year, which will increase scrutiny of the methods tech companies use for verifying users’ ages.
AI is also creating a new frontier of threats, and Meta said on Thursday it was taking steps to alert parents and the emergency services if children discussed suicide or self-harm with its AI chatbots, which are now embedded in Instagram and Facebook.
The new system, which sends alerts to parents who have signed up to supervision tools, will apply in the UK, the EU, the US and Australia. There have been several legal claims against tech companies by the families of young people who have killed themselves after discussing suicide with chatbots.
Ofcom said it also had “serious doubts” about other platforms using techniques that infer users’ ages, from possible indicators such as a user’s nickname or biography on their user profile, their voice and facial features, and content viewed. It said: “In some cases, tech companies may be failing to correctly detect significant numbers of children on their platforms, meaning children risk being exposed to harmful content.”
The regulator added: “Those which use age inference models to comply with their child protection duties should switch to other methods listed in our guidance as highly effective without delay.”
For example, Ofcom’s research found that about one in ۱۰ teenagers aged between ۱۵ and ۱۷ were still using the three most-used dating apps in December ۲۰۲۵, despite age checks being in place.
TikTok is the third most used site or app by ۸- to ۱۴-year-olds in the UK, after YouTube and WhatsApp, according to Ofcom’s studies, with children spending an average of eight hours ۴۵ minutes a week on video-sharing platforms. These include TikTok, YouTube, Twitch and DailyMotion.
TikTok said: “We strictly enforce age-appropriate experiences through expert-informed platform rules and advanced age inference technologies, in line with major industry peers. We are confident that we meet our Online Safety Act obligations and will work with Ofcom to demonstrate this.”
TikTok also said it did not allow content that promoted disordered eating or showed risky weight management behaviours.
Meanwhile, it has also said children are too easily finding links to pornography sites with no age checks by using search engines. Ofcom has found that one in three results returned on the first page of Google Search and ۵۴% on Microsoft-owned Bing sent users to such check-free sites.
The regulator said about a quarter of the UK’s most popular pornography services in the UK had no checks in place. Since ۲۵ July last year, all sites and apps in the UK that allow pornography have been required under the Online Safety Act to have age checks in place to protect children from accessing harmful content.
Ofcom said the two search engines would now be working with the regulator to tackle the discoverability of pornography sites that still did not have age checks.
A spokesperson for Google said: “We are deeply committed to protecting the safety of young people using search in the UK. We automatically lock SafeSearch protections for all users we know or infer to be under ۱۸, filtering out explicit and adult content to ensure a safer experience.” Microsoft declined to comment.
