TikTok is under formal investigation by Ofcom over whether its age checks actually keep children off the platform, in the clearest signal yet that the regulator’s online safety clampdown is moving beyond pornography sites and on to mainstream social media.
The probe will examine how the video-sharing app works out whether a user is a child, and whether its systems are adequate to stop children encountering harmful content. It lands a month after ministers confirmed under-16s will be banned entirely from a range of platforms, and follows a review in May in which Ofcom concluded TikTok was not “safe enough” for children.
“We’re confident that we meet our Online Safety Act obligations and will work with Ofcom to demonstrate it,” a TikTok spokesperson said.
At the heart of the investigation is “age inference”, technology that estimates how old a user is from how they behave on the platform, such as the videos they watch and the accounts they interact with. Instagram deploys similar tools.
Kate Davies, Ofcom’s group director for strategy and research, told BBC’s Today programme: “This is where TikTok comes in. We found that some method of age checks being used by social media are not working well enough”.
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