UK regulator Ofcom is investigating TikTok after raising “serious doubts” about the effectiveness of its ability to identify when a person is under 18.
On the same day it published its first Age Assurance Report and coming a few months before TikTok is set to be banned for kids and teens, Ofcom said it has evidence to suggests that, in some cases, TikTok’s “age inference methods may be failing to correctly detect significant numbers of children, putting them at risk of exposure to harmful content.”
Ofcom criticized the Chinese-owned platform’s “age inference” approach to identifying under-18s. The method involves analyzing a user’s activity and behavior to estimate whether they are a child or an adult, but Ofcom said it is “not included in our industry guidance as a method that is capable of being highly effective for this purpose.”
Ofcom is now probing TikTok under the new Online Safety Act, which challenges social media platforms that fail to ban harmful content and forces them to use effective age checks. Ofcom has also been investigating X using the same powers over its Grok AI image tool.
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If TikTok is found in breach, the company could be fined up to £18m ($24.3M) or 10% of its qualifying worldwide revenue.
The news comes just a few months before TikTok and other social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube are set to be banned in the UK for under-16s, as Britain becomes the second nation after Australia to introduce this measure. Those aged between 16 and 18 will also be subject to social media curfews, while the government also aims to stop addictive features such as auto-play and infinite scroll.
After this ban was proposed last month, a TikTok spokesman said it “shares the government’s goal of safe online experiences for teens, which is why teen accounts on TikTok have more than 50 preset safety and privacy settings.”
We have reached out to TikTok for comment on the Ofcom investigation.
Ofcom’s Age Assurance report found “significant progress” in the first few months of the Online Safety Act, with the proportion of children encountering highly effective age checks nearly doubling overall.
