Social media giant TikTok is open to embracing a government run verification database to prevent underage children from using the app.
The platform's Australian acting public policy director Ella Woods-Joyce told a parliamentary committee examining how enforcement agencies tackle child exploitation that a centralised database had merits.
While TikTok requires users to be over the age of 13, 17 million accounts owned by children under the age limit were removed in the last quarter alone.
Ms Woods-Joyce said the platform had improved detection methods to stop predatory and exploitative behaviour as well as remove underage users.
She said an age verification database could be a solution in order to stop children lying about their age to be on the app.
"We would be interested in exploring that," she told the inquiry.
"A situation we would probably want to avoid is where users might need to provide verification across five or 10 or 20 different apps.
"We'd be interested as to discuss that further and how that could be integrated into the service that we provide for Australians."
The TikTok executive defended the app not having age verification measures already on the platform to stop underage users.
Users over 13 but under 18 have restrictions put in place on their account, such as not being able to live stream or only being able to direct message people who are also under 18.
"The balance for privacy is is always a really big one for digital platforms like us," Ms Woods-Joyce said.
"We do very aggressively identify accounts that we believe are being operated by a younger user under the age of 13."
The inquiry heard the number of reports TikTok had passed on to the US National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children had risen from 596 in 2019 to 288,000 in 2022.
Ms Woods-Joyce said the app took a zero tolerance approach for content that might be considered child sexual exploitation or abuse.
"We will be reluctant to put (the increase in reports) down to any single one factor," she said.
"We know that of course this is a very challenging body of work that all of digital platforms deal with that law enforcement deal with every day."
