UK Regulator Opens Investigation Into TikTok Over Child Age-Verification Failures

Britain's communications regulator is investigating whether TikTok has been letting children slip through the cracks of its age checks, exposing them to content the platform is legally required to keep away from minors.

Ofcom announced the probe Wednesday, saying TikTok's methods for estimating how old its users are may have failed to catch "a significant proportion of children," according to the regulator's press release. That matters because those same children could then be served content covered by the UK's Online Safety Act, including pornography and posts about suicide or eating disorders.

The core issue is how TikTok figures out a user's age in the first place. Like many social platforms, it leans heavily on what's known as age inference: software that estimates age not by checking an ID or scanning a face, but by studying patterns in how someone uses the app, their browsing habits, who they interact with, and other behavioral signals. It's a workaround that avoids asking users to hand over documents or biometric data, but Ofcom says it's also not good enough on its own.

That's a real problem for TikTok, because age inference isn't one of the methods the Online Safety Act actually classifies as "highly effective." Ofcom has published a list of verification approaches that meet that bar, and inference-based guessing didn't make the cut. The regulator says it has "particular concerns" about how TikTok has been applying these techniques specifically.

What Ofcom is telling platforms to do instead

The regulator's message to the industry was blunt: if you're relying on age inference to meet your child-protection obligations, stop, and switch to something on the approved list. "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," Ofcom said in its statement.

Ofcom's chief executive, Melanie Dawes, framed age verification as foundational to the entire online safety framework Britain has built. "Age checks are a cornerstone of the UK's online safety laws," she said. "Too many services have no or inadequate age checks in place, which is not good enough."

The stakes for TikTok are significant. Companies found in violation of the Online Safety Act can be fined up to £18 million, or 10% of their qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater — a formula that, for a company TikTok's size, could translate into a far larger penalty than the flat fee alone suggests. In the most serious cases, UK authorities have the power to force a platform offline entirely.

TikTok pushed back on the substance of the investigation without disputing that it's happening. A company spokesperson said TikTok "strictly enforce[s] age-appropriate experiences through expert-informed platform rules and advanced age inference technologies, in line with major industry peers," and pointed to years of investment in safety work. "In the eight years since TikTok launched in the UK, we have invested billions in platform safety," the statement said. "We are confident that we meet our Online Safety Act obligations and will work with Ofcom to demonstrate this."

A bigger crackdown is coming

The investigation lands as the UK's Labour government pushes toward something far more sweeping: a proposed ban on social media access for anyone under 16. If passed, the rule would apply to major "user-to-user" platforms, not just TikTok but Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and Snapchat as well. Officials have said they intend to bring the legislation to Parliament before Christmas.

That looming policy raises the bar on age verification considerably. Dawes noted that the industry is already being pushed toward what she called a "whole-of-system approach" to age assurance, rather than a single checkbox measure, and that the coming restrictions will demand even stronger checks than what's required today. Separately, Ofcom said it plans to give Parliament its own analysis of what effective age verification actually looks like in practice, ahead of any vote on the under-16 ban.

For now, the TikTok investigation is Ofcom's most direct enforcement action yet testing whether age-inference technology, the method most of the industry currently leans on, can survive scrutiny under a law that doesn't officially endorse it. Ofcom said it will provide an update on the investigation's status in October. Whatever conclusion it reaches will likely shape how every major platform handles age verification well before Britain's proposed under-16 social media ban ever reaches a vote.