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

Firms are required, by law, to respond to all statutory information requests from Ofcom in an ‘accurate, complete and timely way’.

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, Ofcom asked TikTok to provide data on the take-up of its parental controls feature, “Family Pairing”. The regulator stated that 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 initial information request on 4 September 2023. On 1 December 2023, the social media platform highlighted that the data it had provided to Ofcom 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, while also considering 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 the regulator to the issues.

Results of Ofcom’s investigation

Ofcom’s investigation uncovered a ‘number of failings in TikTok’s data governance processes’. According to Ofcom, not only did the company have insufficient checks in place leading to an inaccurate data submission to the regulator in the first place, but TikTok was also slow in bringing the error to attention or act quickly enough to remedy the issue.

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

This delay meant that Ofcom was forced, at a late stage, to remove details of the effectiveness of TikTok’s parental controls from the report, materially disrupting its 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 Ofcom’s 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 regulatory body’s work in producing the Child Safety Report. As such, the company ‘contravened its duties under s368Z10 and s368Y of the Communications Act 2003,’ according to Ofcom.

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

Ofcom has stated that they ‘consider the penalty is appropriate and proportionate to the contravention. In deciding the level, we took into account, among other things, that:

• TikTok is a large, well-resourced company, which is well aware of its regulatory obligations. As such, we would have expected it to take much greater care to ensure that any data submitted to Ofcom was properly interrogated, cross-checked and reviewed through appropriate governance channels prior to being submitted to Ofcom;
• the data inaccuracies and delays had a direct impact on our regulatory work – notably hindering our ability to effectively monitor TikTok’s parental control system and undermining the process for making that information public; and
• this is the first time that TikTok has been found in breach of our rules. Significant weight was also given to the fact that, notwithstanding its failings, TikTok proactively self-reported the error to us and has since taken steps to improve its internal processes.’

The penalty includes a 25% reduction from the penalty Ofcom would otherwise have imposed, as a result of TikTok accepting the findings and settling the case.

Commenting, Suzanne Cater, Ofcom’s enforcement director, said: “Ofcom’s job is to scrutinise platforms’ safety features, and gathering information is a critical part of holding tech firms to account. When we demand data, it must be accurate and submitted on time. We won’t hesitate to take enforcement action if any company fails to do this.”