Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether he plans to bring forward legislation as a result of his White Paper on online harms to require social media platforms to conduct impact assessments before offering new services to children.

We will set out plans for tackling online harms and keeping children safe, including from child sexual exploitation and abuse, in the forthcoming Online Harms White Paper. The White Paper will set out clear responsibilities and requirements for all social media providers 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. The Home Secretary set out five key demands of industry at his speech at the NSPCC on 3 September, including stopping online grooming and live-streaming of abuse. As part of this commitment to protect children from online harms, 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.

The National Crime Agency’s National Strategic Assessment for 2018 has assessed that livestreaming is a growing threat. In his speech at the NSPCC on the 3 September, the Home Secretary highlighted awareness of this risk to children due to improving technology and the growing ease of money transfers across borders.

The Home Secretary stated that he demands a more effective partnership between technology companies, law enforcement, the charity sector and Government. To support these aims, the Home Office has made £250,000 available to support new ideas on how to detect and disrupt the live-streaming of abuse.