The UK media regulator Ofcom has opened an investigation into TikTok over concerns about what the video-sharing platform is doing, or not doing, to protect young people online. The inquiry falls under the Online Safety Act, the legislation that places duties on major online services to shield children from adult and harmful material, and marks a significant escalation in the regulator's scrutiny of one of the world's most popular apps.
At the centre of the investigation is the way TikTok checks the ages of the people using it. Because of the sheer volume of content uploaded to platforms like TikTok, the companies cannot be certain that adult or harmful material is not slipping through, which is why Ofcom says they need to know the ages of their users. Establishing who is and is not under 18 has therefore become a central plank of how the regulator expects services to keep children safe.
TikTok relies on a technique known as age inference, and it has been using this approach for some time. Rather than asking users directly, the platform tries to work out how old someone is by studying their behaviour on the app: the kinds of videos they hover over and watch again, the clips they share, and the accounts they interact with. All of that data is fed in, and the system then guesses the user's age without ever proactively asking them.
Ofcom, however, does not regard age inference as good enough to protect young people. The regulator sets out a number of methods it does consider effective, such as AI facial age estimation, where a user takes a selfie and software estimates how old they are, or a straightforward identity check, similar to showing ID when buying alcohol in a shop. The approach TikTok uses is not on that approved list, which is what has brought the company into the regulator's sights.
The stakes for the company are considerable. Officials indicated that the investigation could ultimately result in TikTok being fined as much as 10 percent of its global revenue, a potentially enormous penalty. The more likely outcome that Ofcom is understood to be hoping for, however, is that the process pushes TikTok to change the way it verifies the ages of its UK users so that its methods fall into line with what the regulator deems appropriate.
TikTok responded to the opening of the investigation by defending its practices. The company said it strictly enforces age-appropriate experiences through expert-informed platform rules and what it called advanced age-inference technologies, in line with major industry peers. It added that in the eight years since it launched in the United Kingdom it had invested billions in platform safety, that it was confident it met its Online Safety Act obligations, and that it would work with Ofcom to demonstrate this.
Officials cautioned that this was only the start of what is likely to be a fairly long road, with the investigation now set to run its course. The action fits into a wider drive to enforce the Online Safety Act, and comes at a time when the government has also signalled its intention to introduce a social media ban for under-16s, a measure that is expected to capture AI chatbots as well as conventional platforms.
On the same day, in what was described as a busy day across the social media landscape, Meta separately announced new artificial intelligence safeguards aimed at teenagers. Under the plans, parents who have signed up for supervision and linked their accounts to their children's would be alerted if their teenagers began discussing certain topics with Meta's AI, while a team at the company monitoring AI-flagged conversations would be able to inform law enforcement if they believed a user was at imminent risk of suicide, so that first responders could be notified.