{"id":56870,"date":"2026-07-18T01:01:51","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T01:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/tiktok-faces-ofcom-investigation-over-child-age-checks\/"},"modified":"2026-07-18T01:01:51","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T01:01:51","slug":"tiktok-faces-ofcom-investigation-over-child-age-checks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/tiktok-faces-ofcom-investigation-over-child-age-checks\/","title":{"rendered":"TikTok faces Ofcom investigation over child age checks"},"content":{"rendered":"


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An investigation has been launched into whether TikTok is doing enough to keep children off its platform.<\/b><\/p>\n

The probe by media regulator Ofcom comes a month after the UK government announced that under-16’s would be banned entirely from a range of platforms<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ofcom will examine how the video-sharing app assesses if a user is a child and whether it has adequate systems to prevent children from viewing harmful content.<\/p>\n

“We’re confident that we meet our Online Safety Act obligations and will work with Ofcom to demonstrate it,” a TikTok spokesperson said.<\/p>\n

It follows a review by regulator in May which criticised the platform for not being “safe enough” for children and called for stronger action on children’s online safety.<\/p>\n

Kate Davies, Ofcom’s group director for strategy and research told BBC’s Today programme: “This is where TikTok comes in. We found that some method of age checks being used by social media are not working well enough”.<\/p>\n

At the heart of the regulator’s probe into the platform is its use of technology known as “age inference”.<\/p>\n

This essentially relies on estimating how old a user is based on how they use the platform, such as the videos they watch or others they interact with.<\/p>\n

Davies said Ofcom had “serious doubts” over whether such tools are good enough at checking the age of users.<\/p>\n

The regulator requires social media platforms, among others, to use “highly effective” methods to check users are old enough to use them and prevent children from seeing harmful material.<\/p>\n

“We have very serious questions about whether age inference can be highly effective,” she said.<\/p>\n

But a TikTok spokesperson said: “We strictly enforce age-appropriate experiences through expert-informed platform rules and advanced age inference technologies, in line with major industry peers.”<\/p>\n

They said the company had invested “billions” in online safety since launching in the UK eight years ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An investigation has been launched into whether TikTok is doing enough to keep children off its platform. The probe by media regulator Ofcom comes a month after the UK government announced that under-16’s would be banned entirely from a range of platforms. Ofcom will examine how the video-sharing app assesses if a user is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56871,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[3184,2832,2086,616,2906,6492,806],"class_list":["post-56870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech","tag-age","tag-checks","tag-child","tag-faces","tag-investigation","tag-ofcom","tag-tiktok"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56872,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56870\/revisions\/56872"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}