A Texas judge has found that TikTok broke US consumer protection law by overstating how well it filters harmful content from young users - on almost exactly the grounds Ofcom is currently investigating the same company for in the UK.
District Judge Cory Liu ruled yesterday that TikTok misrepresented its "Restricted Mode" safety setting and reclassified some rule-breaking content as merely "hard to find" rather than removing it, despite telling users the material would be taken down. The ruling followed a case Texas brought in January 2025, accusing TikTok of marketing itself as safe for children while failing to deliver on that promise. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office says the case will now go to trial, expected to be scheduled next month.
That case is American, but the parallel with the UK is close and current. Ofcom opened its own investigation into TikTok in July, examining whether the platform is meeting its child safety and age assurance duties under the Online Safety Act. Ofcom said the probe followed its own review finding TikTok was "failing" to protect children "despite overwhelming evidence of harm", and specifically questioned whether TikTok's age-checking systems can reliably identify underage users. TikTok says it is confident it meets its obligations. A finding against the platform there would carry fines of up to £18 million or 10% of global revenue.
Two things are converging at once. A US court has now found that a platform's own marketing of a child safety feature was misleading. Separately, the UK regulator is examining the same company over the same category of claim: whether its child protection systems work as described. Neither case has to succeed for insurers to have a problem. The fact that both are being argued on the same basis - that a safety feature didn't do what it said - is itself relevant.
Rosehana Amin, partner at Clyde & Co in London, has described a broader shift in how these claims are framed: away from arguments about content hosted on a platform, and towards arguments about how the product itself was designed, tested and marketed. That reframing changes which parts of an insurance programme actually respond. Media and privacy wordings built around defamation or third-party content were not written with false safety-feature marketing or design defects in mind.
A related US ruling adds weight to the point. In March, a Delaware court found that Meta's own liability insurers had no duty to defend the company against a wave of youth addiction lawsuits, on the basis that the alleged harm came from deliberate design choices rather than an accidental "occurrence" of the kind general liability policies are built around.
Days later a Los Angeles jury found Meta liable in a related case and awarded $6 million in damages. Neither ruling is binding in England and Wales, but the reasoning behind them - that engineered features are a different risk category to unforeseen accidents - is the same reasoning UK courts would have to grapple with if an equivalent claim were brought here.
The UK government has already announced a ban on social media accounts for under-16s, expected to take effect from spring 2027 and covering TikTok alongside Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. Sixteen and seventeen-year-olds are also due to get the option of overnight social media curfews and the ability to switch off infinite scroll. Ofcom's child safety codes under the Online Safety Act are already in force, and its enforcement powers include fines of up to £18 million or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue.
Ed Ventham, co-founder of specialist broker Assured Cyber, thinks the exposure will spread well beyond cyber and media policies as this plays out: "It's not just cyber, not just media - it's tech, product liability, potentially casualty," he has said. Kenny Carmichael, technology practice leader at CFC Underwriting, makes a related point about how the market currently prices these accounts, arguing that platforms with social or messaging features have largely been underwritten as data risks rather than product risks - even though the claims now emerging concern how the product itself was built, not how data on it was accessed or breached.
The largest platforms have the resources to settle, redesign features and absorb the reputational hit, TikTok and Meta have already shown that this year. Ventham's view is that smaller UK businesses running social, messaging or community features, often built into a wider app or service, are worse placed to cope. They are less likely to have reviewed whether their liability cover actually responds to a claim framed around defective design, false safety marketing, or a failed age-check system, rather than the defamation or user-content claims their policies were originally written for.
For UK brokers, the practical question raised by the Texas ruling isn't really about TikTok. It's whether any client marketing a "safe mode", an age gate, parental controls or automated content filtering can back up those claims in practice - because that is now the specific factual ground on which regulators and courts, on both sides of the Atlantic, are finding platforms liable.
With Ofcom's TikTok investigation still open and the Texas trial still to come, this is unlikely to be the last ruling of its kind this year. The question for insurers isn't whether platform liability claims are coming to the UK. Ofcom is already running one. It's whether current wordings, built for a content-moderation world, will actually respond when the next claim lands.
