Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of social media platforms approaches to tackling grooming and online sexual abuse.

In September, the Home Secretary made a speech setting out clear asks of industry, including stopping online child grooming and he made it clear that industry needed to do much more to respond to this evolving threat.

We are already working with social media companies so we can protect users and change user behaviour online. While several of the tech giants have taken important and positive steps to make their platforms safer, the performance of internet companies overall has been very mixed.

Earlier this month, the Home Secretary co-hosted the Microsoft led Hackathon in America, where he met with leading industry stakeholders to identify robust ways to tackle and prevent child sexual abuse on the internet. It was a well attended and positive event which saw all areas of the technological industries coming together in cooperation with Government in seeking to build and implement tools to take charge against this threat. A prototype tool was developed at the Hackathon that can be used to automatically flag potential conversations taking place between child groomers and children, which will be licensed free of charge to smaller and medium-sized technology companies worldwide.

We have already committed to legislate and will set out our plans in the forthcoming Online Harms White Paper. How far we legislate will be informed by the industry response.This winter we will publish a White Paper, setting out new laws to tackle the full range of online harms and set clear responsibilities for tech companies to keep UK citizens safe. Until now, the Government has primarily encouraged internet companies to take action on a voluntary basis. There has been considerable progress through this approach, however, it has been slower in some areas than oth-ers and there is more to do. This is why we are now considering options around statutory intervention.

The Government has heard stakeholder calls for an Internet Regulator and we must carefully consider all the options to address existing and emerging issues relating to online safety, including what legislation will be necessary and whether a regulator is needed.