Ofcom Opens Formal Investigation Into Whether TikTok's Age Checks Actually Work

Ofcom, the UK's communications regulator, has opened a formal investigation into whether TikTok is meeting its legal obligations to keep children off the platform and away from harmful content.

The probe targets Section 12 of the Online Safety Act 2023, which requires platforms to manage the risk that children encounter harmful material online. Ofcom will examine whether TikTok's method for identifying underage users, known as "age inference," is good enough to satisfy the law's requirement for "highly effective" age-checking systems.

Age inference doesn't ask for ID. It guesses a user's age by watching how they behave on the app, what videos they watch, who they interact with, what their profile says. Ofcom's Kate Davies, the regulator's group director for strategy and research, told BBC's Today programme that Ofcom has "very serious questions about whether age inference can be highly effective."

That skepticism isn't new. Ofcom already ruled out age inference as an acceptable standalone method for pornography sites and other platforms that legally cannot host children at all, according to Engadget. The regulator's logic: age inference needs to watch a user's behavior for a while before it can make a call, which means by design it can't stop underage access up front. It's a detection tool, not a gate.

Applying that same logic to TikTok, which has 13 as its minimum age, is the crux of this investigation.

TikTok pushed back hard. "We strictly enforce age-appropriate experiences through expert-informed platform rules and advanced age inference technologies, in line with major industry peers," a company spokesperson said in statements to both BBC and Engadget. The company says it has invested "billions" in online safety since launching in the UK eight years ago.

TikTok also detailed how its system actually works, according to Engadget. New users must enter a birthdate at signup. Anyone who fails the minimum-age check is immediately blocked from re-registering with a different birthdate. From there, TikTok says it runs "multiple checks," including the age-inference model, reviews of profile information and posted videos, and human moderator review of flagged accounts. Anyone, not just users, can report a suspected underage account.

TikTok says a European pilot of this system successfully removed thousands of underage accounts. That number is worth weighing against Ofcom's skepticism. It suggests the system catches some cases. The open question, which Ofcom's investigation is specifically designed to answer, is whether it catches enough of them, fast enough, to count as "highly effective" under the law.

A regulator saying "we have doubts this technology works" is not the same as proving it doesn't. Ofcom has stressed no conclusions have been reached about TikTok specifically. This is an investigation, not a verdict. Companies deserve the chance to make their case, and TikTok is doing exactly that by pointing to its layered system and pilot results.

Ofcom's institutional position isn't neutral either. The regulator has its own incentive to be seen as tough on child safety, especially after a May review already found TikTok wasn't "safe enough" for children and called for stronger action. Ofcom set the "highly effective" bar itself. It gets to decide whether TikTok cleared it.

The investigation follows an announcement one month earlier that the UK government would ban under-16s outright from a range of platforms, a policy that goes further than requiring better age checks and instead removes a whole age bracket from access altogether.

The stakes for TikTok are concrete. Under the Online Safety Act, compliance failures carry fines up to £18 million or 10% of "qualifying worldwide revenue," whichever is greater, according to Engadget. For a company TikTok's size, 10% of global revenue would dwarf the flat fine. In more severe cases, courts can order third parties like advertisers to disrupt the platform's business entirely.

Ofcom has already fined multiple adult sites for failing similar age-check standards, so this isn't an empty regulatory threat. TikTok is now the highest-profile mainstream social platform to face this specific scrutiny, and Instagram uses comparable age-inference tools of its own. Whatever Ofcom concludes about TikTok's system will likely become the template regulators apply industry-wide. No timeline for a decision has been announced.