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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what plans his Department has to exclude already regulated news publishers from the upcoming online harms legislation.

As stated in the Full Government Response to the Online Harms White Paper consultation, content and articles produced and published by news publishers on their own sites do not constitute user-generated content and are therefore out of scope of the upcoming online harms legislation. Legislation will also exempt below-the-line comments on news publishers’ sites.

In order to protect media freedom, legislation will include robust protections for journalistic content shared on in-scope services. The government will continue to engage with a wide range of stakeholders to develop proposals that protect the invaluable role of a free media and ensure that the UK is the safest place in the world to be online.