As brands continue to plough millions into advertising on TikTok, the company is facing yet another investigation over its child safety record, with Ofcom opening a formal probe into whether the platform has complied with its duties under the Online Safety Act to protect children from harmful content.
The move follows an Ofcom review which concluded that TikTok was “failing” to take steps to protect children “despite overwhelming evidence of harm”, and the publication of another report that “highlighted concerns about children being exposed to harmful content on TikTok”.
In addition, Ofcom has said some systems used by TikTok to check users’ ages “may have failed to correctly identify a significant proportion of children”.
Under the Online Safety Act, platforms must use “highly effective” age assurance to make sure they are not exposing children to harmful content. The regulator can impose a fine of up to £18m or 10% of worldwide revenue, whichever is greater, if it finds TikTok in breach of the Act. The regulator said it would provide an update on the investigation in October.
Ofcom chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes said: “Age checks are a cornerstone of the UK’s online safety laws. When implemented properly, our evidence shows that age checks are helping to create a safer life online for children in the UK.
“But the job is not done and tech companies need to go further. Too many services have no or inadequate age checks in place, which is not good enough. We’ve today launched an investigation into whether TikTok’s age checks are effective in preventing children from seeing harmful content on its platform. And search engines must urgently work with us to solve the problem of children finding porn sites without age checks too easily via their results pages.
“As the UK prepares for further new social media restrictions at 16, the age check landscape is already shifting towards a stronger, whole-of-system approach, which is important to avoid any single point of failure. We want to see continued innovation from the wider tech industry to strengthen protections for children – including from operating systems and at an app store and device-level.”
A TikTok spokesperson said: “We strictly enforce age-appropriate experiences through expert-informed platform rules and advanced age inference technologies, in line with major industry peers.
“In the eight years since TikTok launched in the UK, we have invested billions in platform safety. We are confident that we meet our Online Safety Act obligations and will work with Ofcom to demonstrate this.”
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