Ofcom fines TikTok £1.9m for failure to provide child safety information
Broadcasting and telecoms regulator Ofcom has fined TikTok £1.875 million for "failing to accurately respond to a formal request for information about its parental controls safety feature."
The UK watchdog was given news powers in 2022 to penalise firms that fail to detect and remove remove child sexual abuse content as part of the Online Safety Bill.
Ofcom is permitted to fine transgressors up to £18 million or by 10% of the company's annual turnover, whichever is higher. Companies are obliged to respond to all statutory information requests from Ofcom with accurate and complete information provided in a timely fashion.
TikTok failed to provide complete information on the take-up of its parental controls feature "Family Pairing" following a request last summer, according to Suzanne Cater, Ofcom's enforcement director.
Ofcom requested this information to assess the effectiveness of TikTok's controls in protecting teenage users and to help parents make decisions about children's use of platforms.
TikTok originally responded to the request in September 2023, but in December it retracted the information it had provided, said Cater in a blog post. After it failed to provide new information, Ofcom opened an investigation into the social media giant, which is owned by ByteDance.
"Our investigation uncovered a number of failings in TikTok's data governance processes", said Cater. "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."
TikTok's retraction meant that a report into online child safety had to be amended at the last minute.
Subsequent requests also met with delay, and when TikTok eventually handed over the requested data in March, seven months after the initial deadline, the information was "partial".
"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," Cater stated.
The figure of £1.875 million took account of the fact that this was TikTok's first offence, and that the company had proactively reported the errors in its data once it had discovered them. The fine included a 25% reduction for TikTok's acceptance of Ofcom's findings.
In a statement, TikTok said: "While we subsequently provided the correct information, we fell short of our obligations by not reporting the error sooner, and apologise for any disruption this caused. We are committed to fully cooperating with all of Ofcom's requests and have implemented improvements to our internal processes."
The Ofcom fine is possibly the least of ByteDance's regulatory woes. Last week the EU Court of Justice upheld the European Commission's decision to designate ByteDance as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), dismissing all arguments presented by the company.
The company is also under a bi-partisan threat from US lawmakers seeking to ban TikTok unless ByteDance sell a controlling stake to a US company.