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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, whether the Online Harms Bill will take a twin track approach to regulatory standards and enforcement of (a) illegal and (b) legal but harmful content; and if he will make a statement.

Our online harms legislation will take a risk-based and proportionate approach to ensuring companies protect their users from harmful content and improve their safety. Regulation will establish differentiated expectations on companies for illegal and legal but harmful content and activity. Importantly, it will also require companies to ensure a higher level of protection for children.

In scope services will need to ensure that illegal content is removed expeditiously and that the risk of it appearing is minimised by effective systems. For legal but harmful content accessed by adults, companies will be required to explicitly state what content and behaviour they deem to be acceptable on their sites and enforce this consistently and transparently. For children, companies will need to use a proportionate range of tools including age assurance, and age verification technologies to prevent them from accessing age-inappropriate content and to protect them from other harms. Further detail will be provided in the Full Government Response to the Online Harms White Paper which will be published this year.