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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, with reference to the recommendation of the Joint Committee scrutinising the Online Safety Bill that the exemption for news publisher content should be amended to cover consumer and business magazines, what steps her Department has taken to engage with industry bodies to create a definition of news-related material that encompasses IPSO-regulated specialist publishers.

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.