LONDON—Ofcom, the United Kingdom's digital regulator, announced Wednesday that it is investigating social media platform TikTok as the agency released its first age verification usage report since the implementation of the country's sweeping Online Safety Act last summer.
Over the past year, age checks have been deployed by major digital platforms operating in the U.K.'s digital space at an "unprecedented scale" while also ensuring the U.K. is "at the forefront of global efforts to make online experiences safer for children." Based on data shared by Ofcom, over 69 million age checks have been completed across 32 platforms.
Ofcom is framing this as a much-needed step ahead of the country's ban on social media usage for teenagers aged 16 and under. On the front of adult entertainment platforms and online pornography websites, the top 10 most popular sites in the U.K. and the majority of the top 100 porn sites in general have age checks implemented. According to Ofcom's data, the proportion of minors who were asked to prove their age before accessing a particular site increased from 25 percent to 43 percent between July 2025 and January 2026.
Ofcom notes, "Among the minority of online children who attempt to access pornography (8%), the presence of age checks acts as an effective deterrent. Half of these children only reached sites with age checks in place. Nearly nine in ten of these children’s visits (87%) to porn sites were for under 30 seconds, and 65% were for less than 10 seconds."
Dame Melanie Dawes, the chief executive of Ofcom, praised her agency's work.
"Age checks are a cornerstone of the U.K.’s online safety laws," she said. "When implemented properly, our evidence shows that age checks are helping to create a safer life online for children in the U.K.
“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," Dawes added.
TikTok is now in the crosshairs of Ofcom, Dawes also noted. The platform, one of the most popular video-sharing applications in the world, is often used by adult industry creators and firms to promote new scenes and productions. Also targeted in the new enforcement are search engines like Google and Bing.
She explained, "We’ve today launched an investigation into whether TikTok’s age checks are effective in preventing children from seeing harmful content on its platform. And search engines must urgently work with us to solve the problem of children finding porn sites without age checks too easily via their results pages.
“As the U.K. 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," Dawes concluded.
"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.”
A spokesperson for TikTok shared with multiple news outlets that it "strictly enforces age-appropriate experiences through expert-informed platform rules and advanced age inference technologies, in line with major industry peers." The spokesperson added that TikTok, as a company, is "confident" in compliance.
