The UK’s media regulator isn’t just targeting porn sites these days. They just announced they have opened a formal investigation into TikTok, one of the most mainstream social media platforms on earth. The question being asked is the same one that has been reshaping the adult content industry in recent years: are you actually checking how old your users are?
Ofcom launched the probe on July 16, focusing on TikTok’s use of “age interference” technology, a system that estimates whether a user is a child based on behavioral signals like what videos they watch, who they interact with, and what their profile information suggests. The regulator says it has “serious doubts” about whether this approach meets the legal standard required under the Online Safety Act, which demands “highly effective” age assurance methods rather than educated guesses derived from viewing habits.
TikTok pushed back, saying “strictly enforces age-appropriate experiences through expert-informed platform rules and advanced age inference technologies, in line with major industry peers.” The last phrase is doing a lot of work, because Ofcom’s position is that industry peers using the same method may all be failing the same standard. The regulator said explicitly that platforms relying on age inference to meet their child protection duties should “switch to other methods listed in our guidance as highly effective without delay.”
The stakes aren’t small. Compliance failures can result in fines up to £18 million or 10 percent of qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater. And in very serious cases, Ofcom can apply to have sites blocked or restricted in the UK entirely.
It seems the TikTok investigation is just the start of things. Ofcom also flagged a significant gap in how people are reaching adult content through search engines. According to findings, 33 percent of first-page Google results led users to adult sites with no age verification at all. On Microsoft’s Bing, that figure rose to 54 percent. Someone searching for adult content in the UK can bypass every verified platform and land on unregulated sites within seconds, through results from the two most-used search engines in the country.
Ofcom has said both Google and Microsoft will work with them to address the discoverability of non-compliant adult sites in search results. Google responded by noting it automatically locks SafeSearch protections for users it knows or infers to be under 18, while Microsoft declined to comment.
There is good news, though. Ofcom reports that 64 of the top 100 adult content service sites in the UK now use some form of age assurance, up sharply from a year ago, thanks to more fines, investigations, and naming non-compliant platforms.
The Molly Rose Foundation, set up by the family of Molly Russell who died at 14 after seeing self-harm content on social media, welcomed the TikTok investigation while calling for the probe to also address what it described as the platform’s “toxic algorithms”. That framing of algorithms as a child safety issue points to where this regulatory conversation is heading. Age verification is just the entry point, but algorithm accountability is the goal.
Where Ofcom leads, other regulators tend to follow. The UK has been the most aggressive English-language market for online safety enforcement, but the European Union’s Digital Services Act is moving in the same direction, as is the US federal landscape with the pending KIDS Act. The pressure to truly verify age for all platforms is growing, and platforms need to be ready.