Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of accounting for the effects of (a) financial harm and (b) reputational damage in false online communications compensation cases.

The Online Safety Bill will update criminal law in relation to the communications offences, including a new false communications offence, which will criminalise the sending of a message which the sender knows to be false and sends with the intention to cause harm, without any reasonable excuse.

Under this offence, harm is defined as 'non-trivial psychological or physical harm', and a person who commits the offence could face a prison sentence.