Britain opens probe into TikTok’s child safety measures

LONDON – Britain’s communications regulator on July 16 launched an investigation into whether social media platform TikTok is doing enough under UK law to protect children from harmful content online.

“This investigation will seek to establish whether there are reasonable grounds to believe that TikTok has failed, or is failing, to comply with its legal obligations,” the UK Office of Communications, or Ofcom, said in a statement.

It added that it would in particular look at TikTok’s age verification model.

In response, TikTok, owned by China-based ByteDance, said it was confident that it met obligations set out by Britain’s Online Safety Act, introduced in 2025 to toughen laws around children’s safety.

“We strictly enforce age-appropriate experiences through expert-informed platform rules and advanced age inference technologies, in line with major industry peers,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

Kate Davies, Ofcom’s director for strategy and research, told BBC Radio that the regulator had doubts about age inference, a system whereby social media platforms judge a user’s age by their online behaviour.

“It is not in our guidance as an effective method of age check,” she said.

The Online Safety Act aims to prevent minors from encountering harmful content relating to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and pornography.

Technology firms must also protect children from misogynistic, violent, hateful or abusive material, online bullying and dangerous dares or challenges.

Rule-breakers face fines of up to £18 million (S$31 million) or 10 per cent of their revenue.

Alongside news of its investigation, Ofcom warned in a report that children are able to use search engines to “easily” find pornography sites not using age checks.

Following the finding, Google Search and Microsoft’s Bing search engine “will be working with us as a priority on practical solutions to tackle the discoverability of porn sites without age checks via their services”, the regulator added.

All sites and apps in the UK which allow pornography have been required under the Online Safety Act to have age checks in place to protect children from accessing harmful content. AFP