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 was 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.
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 it requires users to enter a date of birth when they create an account. “We also use technology that looks at information, often called ‘signals’, to check for indicators that someone may not meet our minimum age requirement,” it adds.
Meanwhile, the UK government is preparing 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.
AI is also creating a new frontier of threats, and Meta said on Thursday it was taking steps to alert parents and the emergency services if children discussed suicide or self-harm with its AI chatbots, which are now embedded in Instagram and Facebook.
Meta said the new feature, which sends alerts to parents who have signed up to supervision tools, applied in the UK, the US, Canada and Australia, and would be available globally by the end of the year. There have been several legal claims against tech companies by the families of young people who have killed themselves after discussing suicide with chatbots.
Ofcom said it also had “serious doubts” about other platforms using techniques that infer users’ ages, from possible indicators such as a user’s nickname or biography on their user profile, their voice and facial features, and content viewed. It said: “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.”
The regulator added: “Those which use age inference models to comply with their child protection duties should switch to…
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