Ofcom has opened a formal investigation into whether TikTok is failing to protect children from harmful content, escalating a dispute that has been running in public since May.
The probe, announced on Thursday, examines two things under the Online Safety Act: whether TikTok has adequate measures to work out that a given user is a child, and whether it has the systems and processes to keep children from encountering harmful material once it knows.
Ofcom has said some of the age-check systems TikTok uses may have failed to identify a significant proportion of children correctly.
Opening an investigation is not a finding. Ofcom is explicit that it has reached no conclusion about whether TikTok has breached its duties, and the company will have the chance to respond before anything is decided.
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
The regulator has taken the same step against Telegram, X, and Grok, and has opened investigations into close to 100 services since the Act came into force.
If the regulator does find failures, the ceiling is high. The Act allows fines of up to £18m or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater, which for a company of ByteDance’s scale makes the percentage the number that matters.
The backdrop is a regulator that has been telling TikTok this was coming. In May, Ofcom said TikTok and YouTube had both failed to set out how they would make the personalised feeds pushed to children safe, despite being asked to explain themselves by the end of April.
Neither firm, the regulator said, had “committed to any significant changes in response to our specific demands”, maintaining instead that their feeds were already safe.
Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive, was blunt about it at the time.
“We remain deeply concerned that, despite overwhelming evidence of harm, companies are still failing to take the necessary action to keep underage children off their platforms and make their feeds safer,” she said. “We are determined to force through further changes, using the full extent of our powers and influence.”
The evidence she was referring to is Ofcom’s own. Its children’s online safety tracker found that roughly seven in 10 children aged 11 to 17 had encountered harmful content online, essentially unchanged from before the safety duties took effect in July 2025.
Personalised feeds remained the most common route, cited by 35% of respondents against 37% previously. Nine in 10 children aged eight to 12 were using services with a minimum age of 13.
TikTok has disputed the characterisation. “It’s very disappointing that Ofcom has failed to acknowledge both our longstanding and newer safety features, from no direct messaging for under-16s, pre-set private teen accounts, to our recently enhanced age assurance technologies,” a spokesperson said in May, adding that the company would “continue to make ongoing investments in safety measures”.
TikTok has previously added features capping teenagers’ time in the app.
Where TikTok differed from its peers in May was in what it did not offer. Snapchat agreed to block adult strangers from contacting children by default and to roll out age checks to all users, and Roblox committed to letting parents switch off direct chat for under-16s, after sustained criticism of its child safety record.
Meta said it would use AI to detect sexualised conversations between adults and teenagers in Instagram DMs. TikTok and YouTube pointed at what they already had.
The investigation also lands into a shifting statutory picture. The government legislated in June for a ban on social media for under-16s, expected to take effect in spring 2027, covering TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and X.
If it holds to that timetable, a good deal of what Ofcom is now investigating becomes moot before the investigation concludes.
Ofcom has form on TikTok specifically. It fined the company £1.875m in July 2024 after finding it had submitted inaccurate data about its Family Pairing parental controls and had been slow to flag the error, failings the regulator traced to weak data governance rather than to child safety itself.
TikTok now has a formal proceeding rather than a letter. Ofcom will gather evidence, put its provisional view to the company, and decide. There is no statutory deadline for any of it.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.