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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment he has made of trends in the level of children’s exposure to commercial pornographic material and explicit user generated content on social networks during the covid-19 outbreak; and if he will make a statement.

The Government recognises that the measures required to tackle COVID-19 mean it is likely that more people are spending more time online, including children and young people. Research published by the British Board of Film Classification in May this year found that 47% of children and teens have seen content that they wished they had not seen during lockdown. We will continue to work with technology companies, civil society and academia to understand the risk and the impact to the safety of children online during this period.

Under our world-leading online harms proposals, we expect companies to use age assurance or age verification technologies to prevent children from accessing services which pose the highest risk of harm to children, such as online pornography, including pornography on social media. We would encourage companies to take steps ahead of the legislation to protect children from harmful and age inappropriate content online. We are working closely with stakeholders across industry to establish the right conditions for the market to deliver age assurance and age verification technical solutions ahead of the legislative requirements coming into force.