Asked by: Gregor Poynton (Labour - Livingston)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps he is taking to ensure that social media companies effectively enforce their terms of service to prevent children below the required minimum age from accessing them.
Answered by Feryal Clark - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
Child online safety is of utmost importance to the government. Under the Online Safety Act, all user-to-user services likely to be accessed by children have a duty to include provisions in their terms of service specifying how children of any age are prevented from encountering the most harmful content and protected from encountering other types of harmful content.
Services that have age restrictions must specify in their terms of service what measures they are taking to prevent underage access, and they are required apply these terms consistently.
Asked by: Gregor Poynton (Labour - Livingston)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps Ofcom is taking to prevent children from accessing regulated platforms while under the minimum age limits in those companies’ terms of service.
Answered by Feryal Clark - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
Child online safety is of utmost importance to the government. Under the Online Safety Act, all user-to-user services likely to be accessed by children have a duty to include provisions in their terms of service specifying how children of any age are prevented from encountering the most harmful content and protected from encountering other types of harmful content.
Services that have age restrictions must specify in their terms of service what measures they are taking to prevent underage access, and they are required apply these terms consistently.
Asked by: Gregor Poynton (Labour - Livingston)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what discussions he has had with private messaging platforms on (a) ensuring compliance with the Online Safety Act 2023 and (b) tackling (i) grooming of children and (ii) sharing of child sexual abuse material on their platforms.
Answered by Feryal Clark - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
The government is committed to protecting children from these devastating crimes. The Online Safety Act will place strict safety duties on online platforms to protect children from being groomed by online predators, and to tackle child sexual exploitation and abuse content on their services.
Ministers meet regularly with platforms to discuss implementation of the Online Safety Act, and the duties it will place on services to tackle illegal content on their sites. Ofcom is the independent regulator responsible for ensuring compliance with the regime.