Ofcom Fines TikTok Nearly $2.6M Over Harmful Content Failures

TikTok has been fined nearly £2M ($2.6B) by UK regulator Ofcom, in a sign that the UK regulator is willing to take on the tech giants.

The hefty fine is due to the Chinese-owned social media behemoth’s failure to “accurately respond to a formal request for information” about its measures to protect children from harmful content. TikTok has accepted the findings and Ofcom said the penalty was reduced by 25% to £1.875M for this reason.

By law, companies are required to respond to statutory information requests from Ofcom in an “accurate, complete and timely way.”

Ofcom demanded information for a transparency report from TikTok over harmful content features last year, which it initially responded to on September 4 but subsequently highlighted that the data it had provided was not accurate and that it was conducting an internal investigation to understand the root cause of the inaccuracies.

Ofcom then opened an investigation, finding that TikTok had failed to inform Ofcom about inaccuracies for three weeks after discovering the issue, which 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 our work to promote transparency.”

“Our investigation uncovered a number of failings in TikTok’s data governance processes,” it added. “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.”