UK investigation to determine if TikTok fails to protect children from harmful content

The investigation comes as the UK government prepares to launch a social media ban for under-16s early next year. Photograph: True Images/Alamy View image in fullscreen The investigation comes as the UK government prepares to launch a social media ban for under-16s early next year. Photograph: True Images/Alamy UK investigation to determine if TikTok fails to protect children from harmful content Ofcom concerned platform’s age verification is ineffective, leaving some at risk of seeing posts about self-harm and suicide TikTok is under formal investigation over concerns it has failed to protect children from harmful content, the UK’s online regulator, Ofcom, has announced. The social media platform’s approach to checking the ages of users has sparked “particular concerns” at the watchdog, almost a year after measures to protect children from the worst of online content came into effect under the Online Safety Act. Ofcom said TikTok is using a method of inferring children’s ages that may have failed to correctly identify “a significant proportion of children”, putting them at risk of exposure to harmful content. UK 16- and 17-year-olds to be encouraged to follow midnight social media curfew Read more The regulator said it had not reached any conclusions, but that compliance failures could be punished with fines of up to £18m or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater. Harmful content includes posts about disordered eating, self-harm, suicide and pornography. Ofcom can also apply to have sites blocked or restricted in the UK in the most serious cases. Ofcom said: “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 … including by using age assurance that is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a particular user is a child.” TikTok says that it requires users to enter a date of birth when they create an account. It says “we also use technology that looks at information, often called ‘signals’, to check for indicators that someone may not meet our minimum age requirement.” The investigation comes as the UK government prepares to launch a social media ban for under-16s early next year, which will increase scrutiny of the methods tech companies use for verifying users ages. 1:31 Keir Starmer announces social media ban for under-16s in UK – video Ofcom said it also had “serious doubts” about other platforms using techniques that infer users’ ages. It said that “in some cases, tech companies may be failing to correctly detect significant numbers of children on their platforms, meaning children risk being exposed to harmful content”. It said “those which use age inference models to comply with their child protection duties should switch to other methods listed in our guidance as highly effective without delay”. For example, Ofcom’s research found that about one in 10 teenagers aged between 15 and 17 were st