Brussels: TikTok will begin rolling out new age-verification technology across the European Union in the coming weeks, responding to growing international calls for restrictions on social media use by children under 16, similar to Australia’s recent ban.
Owned by ByteDance, TikTok, along with other platforms popular among young users such as YouTube, faces increasing pressure to identify and remove accounts belonging to minors. The EU system, piloted quietly over the past year, uses profile information, posted videos, and behavioural signals to predict whether an account belongs to a user under the age of 13.
Accounts flagged by the system will not be automatically banned; instead, they will be reviewed by specialist moderators who may then remove them. A UK pilot of the system reportedly led to the deletion of thousands of underage accounts. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, also uses the verification service Yoti to confirm users’ ages on Facebook.
Australia introduced a social media ban for under-16s in December 2025. According to the country’s eSafety commissioner, more than 4.7 million accounts were removed across ten platforms, including TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Snap, and Facebook, since the ban took effect on December 10.
European authorities are increasingly scrutinising how social media platforms verify user ages to comply with data protection regulations. The European Parliament is pushing for strict age limits, while Denmark has proposed banning social media use for those under 15.
In the UK, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has expressed concern over children’s screen time, citing reports of five-year-old’s spending hours daily on smartphones and raising alarm about the potential harm of social media to under-16s. Starmer has now indicated he is open to such measures.
TikTok stated that its new age-verification technology was developed specifically to comply with EU regulatory requirements. The company collaborated with Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, its lead EU privacy authority, throughout the system’s development.
The rollout comes amid heightened scrutiny of platforms like TikTok and YouTube, reflecting a global trend toward protecting children online and ensuring social media companies take responsibility for verifying users’ ages.
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