TikTok facing UK investigation amid fears over age checks and harm to children | TikTok
The UK’s online regulator Ofcom has announced that TikTok is under formal investigation over concerns it is failing to protect children from harmful content.
The social media platform’s approach to checking users’ ages has raised “particular concerns” with the watchdog, almost a year after measures to protect children from the worst online content came into force under the Online Safety Act.
Ofcom said TikTok’s use of a method of estimating children’s ages failed to accurately identify a “significant proportion of children”, putting them at risk of being exposed to harmful content.
The regulator said it had not reached any conclusions but that compliance failures could be punishable by fines of up to £18 million or 10% of worldwide revenue, whichever is greater. Harmful content; Includes posts about eating disorders, self-harm, suicide, and pornography. Ofcom can also seek to block or restrict sites 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 failed to comply with its legal obligations… this includes the use of age assurance, which is highly effective in accurately determining whether a particular user is a child.”
tiktok says Requires users to enter date of birth when creating 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,” he adds.
Meanwhile, the UK government is preparing to impose a social media ban for under-16s early next year; This will increase scrutiny of the methods tech companies use to verify users’ ages.
Artificial intelligence is also creating a new threat frontier, and Meta said on Thursday it was taking steps to alert parents and emergency services if children are discussing suicide or self-harm with AI chatbots now built into Instagram and Facebook.
Meta said the new feature, which sends alerts to parents who sign up for supervision tools, has been implemented in the UK, US, Canada and Australia and will be available globally by the end of the year. Families of young people who committed suicide after discussing suicide with chatbots have filed various legal lawsuits against technology companies.
Ofcom also said it had “serious doubts” about other platforms’ use of techniques that use possible indicators such as a user’s age, a nickname or bio in the user’s profile, voice and facial features and the content viewed. “In some cases, technology companies may not be able to accurately identify significant numbers of children on their platforms, meaning children are at risk of being exposed to harmful content,” the statement said.
The regulator added: “Those who use age inference models to comply with child protection duties should move without delay to other methods listed as highly effective in our guidance.”
Ofcom’s research, for example, found that despite age checks, around one in 10 young people aged 15 to 17 were still using the top three dating apps in December 2025.
According to Ofcom’s research, TikTok is the third most used site or application by children aged 8-14 in the UK, after YouTube and WhatsApp. studiesChildren spend an average of eight hours and 45 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 guidelines and advanced age inference technologies, in line with our major industry peers. We are confident we are meeting our Online Safety Act obligations and will work with Ofcom to demonstrate this.”
TikTok also said it does not allow content that encourages disordered eating or depicts risky weight management behaviors.
Meanwhile, he also stated that children can easily find links to pornography sites without age checks using search engines. Ofcom found that one in three results returned on the first page of Google Search and 54% of Microsoft-owned Bing sent users to such uncontrolled sites.
Nearly a quarter of the most popular pornography services in the UK have no controls whatsoever, the regulator said. Since 25 July last year, all sites and apps that allow pornography in the UK 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 work with the regulator to eliminate the discoverability of pornography sites that still lack age checks.
A spokesperson for Google said: “We’re committed to protecting the safety of young people using search in the UK. To provide a safer experience, we filter out explicit and adult content, automatically locking down SafeSearch protections for any users we know or believe are under 18.” Microsoft declined to comment.
