Ofcom investigates whether TikTok's age checks are keeping children off the app

Ofcom has opened a formal investigation into whether TikTok is doing enough to keep children off its platform, a month after the government announced that under-16s would be banned entirely from a range of social media services.

The regulator will examine how the video-sharing app determines whether a user is a child, and whether it has adequate systems to stop children encountering harmful content. TikTok said it would cooperate. "We're confident that we meet our Online Safety Act obligations and will work with Ofcom to demonstrate it," a spokesperson said.

At the centre of the investigation is a technique known as age inference. Rather than asking users to prove their age with a document or a face scan, the method estimates it from behaviour — which videos someone watches, which accounts they interact with, how they use the app. It is cheap, invisible to the user, and increasingly common across the industry.

Ofcom is not convinced it works. "We have very serious questions about whether age inference can be highly effective," Kate Davies, the regulator's group director for strategy and research, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "We found that some method of age checks being used by social media are not working well enough."

The wording matters. Under the Online Safety Act, platforms are required to use "highly effective" methods to confirm users are old enough and to keep them away from harmful material. If a regulator concludes that behavioural estimation cannot meet that bar, the finding would reach well beyond one company — TikTok itself says its approach is "in line with major industry peers".

The company defended its record. "We strictly enforce age-appropriate experiences through expert-informed platform rules and advanced age inference technologies," the spokesperson said, adding that TikTok had invested "billions" in online safety since launching in the UK eight years ago.

The investigation follows a review published in May in which Ofcom criticised the platform for not being "safe enough" for children and called for stronger action. It forms part of a wider enforcement push under the Act's protection of children's codes, which took effect on 25 July last year and require sites hosting pornography or other adult material to verify that UK visitors are over 18 using methods such as face scans.

That push has already produced results at the harder end of the internet, where Ofcom has fined or opened cases against dozens of adult sites for suspected or proven non-compliance. Applying the same standard to a mainstream app used by a large share of British teenagers is a considerably bigger test — of the platform, and of the law.