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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, if she will make an assessment of the potential impact of the Online Safety Bill on levels of abuse from anonymous unverified social media accounts.

Under the Online Safety Bill, services that host user-generated content will need to remove or limit the spread of illegal content online, including illegal anonymous abuse. Companies will need to mitigate the risk arising from the use of anonymous profiles to facilitate illegal activity on their services.

In addition, adult users of the largest services will have the option to verify their identity, filter out unverified users, and prevent unverified users from interacting with any content which they upload, generate or share. Users will also be better able to report abuse and should expect to receive an appropriate response from the platform.

An assessment of the potential impacts of the Bill, including the mechanisms through which it is expected to result in reduced harm, was published in the Online Safety Bill impact assessment on 17 March 2022.