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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, pursuant to the Answer of 30 September 2020 to Question 94546, and with reference to the report entitled Video Unavailable: Social Media Platforms Remove Evidence of War Crimes, published by Human Rights Watch in September 2020, what steps he is taking to ensure that online platforms preserve evidence of alleged war crimes when taking down extremist and hateful social media content.

The Government is not working specifically on this issue, however it is committed to increasing online safety. As outlined in the Online Harms White Paper, this Government intends to introduce a duty of care on online companies to ensure they have appropriate systems and processes in place to deal with harmful content on their services, overseen by an independent regulator. The regulator will need to build strong working relationships with law enforcement and other bodies in order to ensure effective action against a range of illegal harms.Further details on online harms will be set out in the Full Government Response to the Online Harms White Paper, which will be published shortly.