TikTok fined £1.875m for providing inaccurate data on safety controls

Ofcom has today fined TikTok £1.875 million for failing to accurately respond to a formal request for information about its parental controls safety feature.

Gathering accurate information from regulated companies is fundamental to Ofcom’s job as a regulator. Firms are required, by law, to respond to all statutory information requests from Ofcom in an accurate, complete and timely way. This includes providing accurate and complete information.

In this case, Ofcom sought information from video-sharing platforms under regulations that pre-date the UK’s Online Safety Act, to inform a planned report highlighting the safety measures they have in place to protect children from harmful content.

As part of this process, they asked TikTok to provide data on take-up of its parental controls feature, “Family Pairing”. This information was not only important in helping Ofcom to assess its effectiveness in protecting teenage users but was also to be published to help inform and empower parents to make decisions about which platforms they and their children use.

TikTok responded to the information request on 4 September 2023. On 1 December 2023, TikTok highlighted that the data it had provided was not accurate and that it was conducting an internal investigation to understand the root cause of its inaccuracies.

Given this disclosure, Ofcom launched an investigation on 14 December 2023 into whether the company had failed to comply with its duties to respond to a statutory demand for information.  Ofcom also considered whether TikTok had cooperated fully with Ofcom for the purposes for producing the child safety report, given there appeared to be a considerable delay in alerting us to the issues.

The investigation uncovered a number of failings in TikTok’s data governance processes. Not only did the company have insufficient checks in place leading to an inaccurate data submission to us in the first place, but TikTok was also slow in bringing the error to our attention or to remedy the issue.

Despite being aware that we intended to include its parental controls data in an imminent transparency report, TikTok did not inform Ofcom about the inaccuracy for more than three weeks after discovering the issue.

This delay meant that Ofcom were forced, at a late stage, to remove details of the effectiveness of TikTok’s parental controls from the report, materially disrupting the work to promote transparency.

TikTok subsequently committed to providing accurate information on “Family Pairing” from an alternative data source. But despite Ofcom pressing for progress updates, this too was subject to delays. TikTok ultimately provided accurate, albeit partial, data to the request for information on 28 March 2024 – more than seven months after the original deadline.

The investigation concluded that TikTok failed to fully cooperate with Ofcom’s statutory request for information and with the work in producing the Child Safety Report. As such, the company contravened its duties under s368Z10 and s368Y of the Communications Act 2003.

As a result of these failings, Ofcom has fined TikTok £1.875 million, which will be passed on to HM Treasury.