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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of amending the definition of news-related material in the Online Safety Bill to ensure that content produced by all IPSO regulated publications, including specialist magazine titles, is exempted from platforms’ new online safety duties.

Online Safety legislation has been designed to safeguard access to journalistic content. News publishers’ content will be exempted from platforms’ new online safety duties. The criteria against which an organisation qualifies as a publisher is set in the draft Online Safety Bill. If an organisation meets these criteria, then its content will be exempt. The criteria is clear that it captures news publishers' whose principal purpose is the publication of news-related material.

The Bill will also impose a duty on the biggest and riskiest companies, Category 1 companies, to safeguard all journalistic content shared on their platform. Through this duty, these platforms will need to have systems in place to ensure they take into account the importance of the free expression of journalistic content when operating their services. These protections will cover specialist publishers such as consumer and business magazines, where they are engaged in journalism.