Ofcom launches investigation into TikTok child safety concerns

An investigation has been launched into TikTok over child safety measures.

The probe by media regulator Ofcom comes a month after the UK government announced that under-16’s would be banned entirely from a range of platforms.

Ofcom will examine how the video-sharing app assesses if a user is a child and whether it has adequate systems to prevent children from viewing harmful content.

“We’re confident that we meet our Online Safety Act obligations and will work with Ofcom to demonstrate it,” a TikTok spokesperson said.

It follows a review by regulator in May which criticised the platform for not being “safe enough” for children and called for stronger action on children’s online safety.

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”.

At the heart of the regulator’s probe into the platform is TikTok’s use of technology known as “age inference”.

This essentially relies on estimating how old a user is based on how they use the platform, such as the videos they watch or others they interact with.

Davies said Ofcom had “serious doubts” over whether such tools are good enough at checking the age of users.

The regulator requires social media platforms, among others, to use “highly effective” methods to check users are old enough to use them.

“We have very serious questions about whether age inference can be highly effective,” she said.

But 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.”

They said the company had invested “billions” in online safety since launching in the UK eight years ago.