Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether provisions will be included in the Online Harms White Paper to require social media platforms to invest in preventative measures to tackle online grooming.

We will set out plans for tackling online harms, including Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, in the forthcoming Online Harms White Paper. The White Paper will set out clear responsibilities for tech companies to keep UK citizens safe.

In addition, the Home Secretary has been clear with industry that they should be proactive in combatting child sexual exploitation online, including grooming. As part of this commitment he co-hosted a Hackathon in November in the USA, where he met leading industry stakeholders to identify robust ways to tackle and prevent child sexual abuse on the internet.

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.