TikTok has defended its age verification methods after the UK telecoms regulator launched an investigation.
Ofcom said on Wednesday that it had launched the investigation in response to “serious doubts” over whether TikTok's methods were effectively protecting children online.
The US-based platform uses “age inference” to determine how old a user is through their online behaviour.
“We strictly enforce age-appropriate experiences through expert-informed platform rules and advanced age inference technologies, in line with major industry peers,” a TikTok spokesperson said.
“In the eight years since TikTok launched in the UK, we have invested billions in platform safety. We are confident that we meet our Online Safety Act obligations and will work with Ofcom to demonstrate this,” they said.
The investigation is part of the Online Safety Act, which came into effect on July 25 last year and has required social media platforms to include more comprehensive age verification checks and make risk assessments about content on their platforms that could be harmful to children.
The regulator considers facial age estimation, mobile network age checks, credit card checks, photo ID matching, digital identity services, and confirmation from a bank to be among its “highly effective” age verification checks.
“Our message to social media companies is clear: 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 late on Wednesday.
“If they don’t, they must be able to prove using reliable and compelling evidence to Ofcom that their current method is highly effective.”
Critics say the Online Safety Act is ineffective, and turns safety checks in to a box ticking exercise, without pressuring companies to do more to remove harmful content on their platforms.
Ofcom chief executive Melanie Dawes defended the act on Wednesday, saying the regulator's research showed that age checks were helping to protect children online.
Others fear that identity-based age verification will remove online anonymity – which vulnerable children and adults have also benefitted from.
“Age checks are a cornerstone of the UK’s online safety laws. When implemented properly, our evidence shows that age checks are helping to create a safer life online for children in the UK,” Ms Dawes said.
“But the job is not done and tech companies need to go further. Too many services have no or inadequate age checks in place, which is not good enough,” she added.
“As the UK prepares for further new social media restrictions at 16, the age check landscape is already shifting towards a stronger, whole-of-system approach, which is important to avoid any single point of failure,”
We want to see continued innovation from the wider tech industry to strengthen protections for children – including from operating systems and at an app store and device level.”
This week, the UK government announced it would seek to introduce default curfew settings for children aged 16 and 17 accessing social media for the first time after a ban on social media for under-16s comes into effect next year.
Ofcom said the proportion of children being asked to prove how old they are through age checks increased from 25 per cent to 43 per cent between July 2025 and January 2026.
“All of the UK’s top 10 and the majority of the top 100 porn sites now have age checks in place,” it said in a report.
Age checks had been an “effective deterrent” for the eight per cent of children online who attempt to access pornography. Nearly nine in 10 of these children’s visits (87 per cent) to porn sites were for under 30 seconds, and 65 per cent were for less than 10 seconds.
But there were many platforms where age checks needed to be better implemented, including dating apps. More than 10 per cent of 15-to-17-year-olds could still access three of the most-used dating apps, according to Ofcom figures for December 2025.
“This suggested that their age assurance methods needed to be improved and more closely aligned with our guidance,” it said.
