Ofcom warns TikTok and YouTube are not safe enough for children

Britain’s online-safety regulator is drawing a harder line between what platforms say they protect and what children still experience. Ofcom said TikTok and YouTube had not set out meaningful new steps to make recommendation feeds safer, even though its research found that 73% of 11- to 17-year-olds were exposed to harmful content over a four-week period, mainly through personalized feeds. TikTok was the platform children cited most often for harmful-content exposure, followed by YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat.

The warning goes to the heart of the design features regulators now see as the biggest risk: recommender systems, age checks, messaging tools and the way platforms default children into endless content streams. Ofcom has said major sites and apps must enforce minimum age rules with highly effective age assurance, and that if services cannot verify age well enough, they should assume younger children are on the service and provide an age-appropriate experience. In March 2026, Ofcom wrote to Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube and gave them until 30 April to spell out what they would do to tackle grooming, strengthen age checks and make feeds safer.

For TikTok, the scrutiny is not new. Ofcom fined the company £1.875 million on 24 July 2024 after it failed to accurately answer a formal information request about parental controls, including data tied to its Family Pairing feature. That case undercut TikTok’s safety claims at the same time regulators were trying to publish transparency data for parents.

The UK push also has a U.S. echo. The Federal Trade Commission finalized changes to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule in January 2025, requiring opt-in consent for targeted advertising and tightening rules around children’s data collection and retention. In February 2026, the FTC said age-verification technologies could be used without enforcement under certain conditions, and noted that some states had already begun requiring age verification mechanisms. The difference is scope: U.S. law still centers on children under 13 and privacy, while Ofcom is targeting the broader under-18 experience, where TikTok and Instagram are content engines and Snapchat is a major messaging platform. Ofcom’s own 2024 research found children aged 5 to 7 were increasingly online, with a third using social media unsupervised, suggesting the next regulatory fight will be over whether safety features are actually built into products, not just described in policy pages.