Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps her Department is taking to ensure social media platforms take a proactive approach to tackling online harm.

The Online Safety Bill will usher in a new age of accountability for tech companies and for the first time they will be accountable to an independent regulator to keep their users, particularly children, safe from online harms.

The new regulatory regime will give them clear legal responsibilities to understand the risk of harm to users and put in place proactive systems and processes to improve user safety. In scope companies must take action to prevent the proliferation of illegal content and activity online and ensure that children who use their services are not exposed to harmful or inappropriate content. The biggest tech companies must also take action on legal content that may harm adults. We expect companies to take steps now to improve safety, and not wait for the legislation.

We are also taking action to protect users now. For example, DCMS has published safety by design guidance and a ‘one-stop shop’ for companies on protecting children online.