TikTok Guesses Children’s Ages. Ofcom Says It’s Getting Too Many Wrong.

On Wednesday, July 16, 2026, Britain’s media regulator opened a formal investigation into TikTok, saying the way the app guesses how old its users are may be failing to identify large numbers of children and leaving them exposed to harmful content. It was among the sharpest enforcement tests yet of the child-safety duties at the heart of the country’s Online Safety Act.

Ofcom said it had opened the investigation into TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited to examine whether the video app is failing to comply with its duties, under section 12 of the Online Safety Act, to protect children from encountering harmful material, the regulator said. At the centre of the inquiry is a technology known as “age inference,” which estimates how old a person is not from an identity document or a face scan but from how they behave on the platform — the videos they watch and the accounts they interact with.

Ofcom said its evidence indicated that age-inference models such as the one TikTok uses may have failed to correctly identify a significant proportion of children, putting them at risk of exposure to harmful content, according to the regulator. Companies that rely on age inference to meet their child-protection duties, it added, should switch to other methods listed in its guidance as highly effective “without delay.”

What Ofcom is investigating

Under the Online Safety Act, in force since 2023, the largest platforms must keep children from encountering material the law treats as harmful, from pornography and content promoting suicide or self-harm to violent and hateful posts. Doing that depends on a platform knowing which of its users are children in the first place. TikTok’s answer has leaned heavily on age inference: rather than verifying ages directly, its systems try to predict whether an account belongs to someone under 18 by reading their activity, Ofcom said.

The regulator said it had serious doubts about whether age-guessing of that kind can be effective enough to do the job the law requires. Opening an investigation does not mean Ofcom has concluded there has been a breach; its first stage is to gather information and evidence, a process it expects to take about three months, with an update due in October 2026, the regulator said.

The harmful content children keep meeting

The investigation followed Ofcom’s own research into what British children encounter online. In a report published in the spring, the regulator found that 73 percent of 11- to 17-year-olds had come across harmful content in a single four-week period, and that the proportion had not meaningfully fallen even after child-safety duties took effect in July 2025, according to Ofcom’s research.

Among secondary-school-aged children who said they had seen harmful material, 53 percent named TikTok — more than any other platform in the survey, ahead of YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, Ofcom said. More than a third of the children who encountered such content said they had met it while scrolling through their main recommendation feeds — the automated streams that decide what a young user sees next.

A test for the Online Safety Act

The case is one of the clearest signs that Britain’s online-safety regime has moved from writing rules to enforcing them. If Ofcom ultimately finds that TikTok breached its duties, the regulator can impose a fine of up to 18 million pounds, or 10 percent of the company’s qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater, Ofcom said. For a platform of TikTok’s size, the revenue-based figure would dwarf the flat cap.

Ofcom has increasingly used those powers over the past year, opening a separate investigation in January into how the Grok tool on Elon Musk’s X was used to generate sexualised images, and issuing age-assurance fines against pornography operators, the regulator’s enforcement record shows.

A wider European reckoning

The British action landed in the middle of a broader push across Europe to hold social platforms responsible for the harm their feeds can do to young users. Within days, France became the first country in the European Union to bar children under 15 from social media, citing cyberbullying and content that promotes self-harm, according to CNN. A week after the Ofcom move, the European Commission issued a preliminary finding that TikTok’s account settings for minors breached the bloc’s Digital Services Act, exposing teenagers to strangers and unwanted contact, Bloomberg reported.

Britain is weighing tighter limits of its own: in June the government said it planned to bar under-16s from a range of platforms, including TikTok, NPR reported. For now, the question Ofcom has put to TikTok is narrower but no less consequential: whether a system that only guesses a user’s age can reliably tell a child from an adult — and keep the youngest users away from the content the law was written to shut out.