Social media giant TikTok has once again found itself on the wrong side of the UK’s regulatory regime after being slapped with a £1.9m fine by Ofcom for failing to accurately respond to a formal request for information about its parental controls safety feature.
Firms are required, by law, to respond to all statutory information requests from Ofcom in an accurate, complete and timely way. This includes providing accurate and complete information.
In this case, Ofcom sought information from video-sharing platforms under regulations that pre-date the UK’s Online Safety Act, to inform a planned report highlighting the safety measures TikTok had in place to protect children from harmful content.
As part of this process, it asked TikTok to provide data on take-up of its parental controls feature, “Family Pairing”. This information was not only important in helping Ofcom to assess its effectiveness in protecting teenage users but was also to be published to help inform and empower parents to make decisions about which platforms they and their children use.
TikTok responded to Ofcom’s information request on September 4 2023, however, on December 1 2023, the company highlighted that the data it had provided was not accurate and that it was conducting an internal investigation to understand the root cause of its inaccuracies.
Given this disclosure, Ofcom launched an investigation on December 14 2023 into whether the company had failed to comply with its duties to respond to a statutory demand for information. The probe also considered whether TikTok had co-operated fully with Ofcom for the purposes for producing the child safety report, given there appeared to be a considerable delay in alerting the regulator to the issues.
Ofcom’s investigation uncovered a number of failings in TikTok’s data governance processes. Not only did the company have insufficient checks in place leading to an inaccurate data submission in the first place, but TikTok was also slow in bringing the error to Ofcom’s attention or to remedy the issue.
Despite being aware that the regulator intended to include its parental controls data in an imminent transparency report, TikTok did not inform Ofcom about the inaccuracy for more than three weeks after discovering the issue.
This delay meant that Ofcom was forced, at a late stage, to remove details of the effectiveness of TikTok’s parental controls from the report, materially disrupting its work to promote transparency.
TikTok subsequently committed to providing accurate information on “Family Pairing” from an alternative data source. But despite Ofcom pressing for progress updates, this too was subject to delays.
TikTok ultimately provided accurate, albeit partial, data to the request for information on March 28 2024 – more than seven months after the original deadline.
Ofcom’s investigation concluded that TikTok failed to fully cooperate with Ofcom’s statutory request for information and with its work in producing the Child Safety Report. As such, the company contravened its duties under s368Z10 and s368Y of the Communications Act 2003.
As a result of these failings, Ofcom has fined TikTok £1.875 million, which will be passed on to HM Treasury.
Ofcom’s enforcement director Suzanne Cater said: “Ofcom’s job is to scrutinise platforms’ safety features, and gathering information is a critical part of holding tech firms to account. When we demand data, it must be accurate and submitted on time. We won’t hesitate to take enforcement action if any company fails to do this.”
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