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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps he is taking to protect (a) vulnerable children, (b) young people, (c) young carers and (d) people in the care system through regulation of the internet.

The Online Harms White Paper sets out our plans for world-leading legislation to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online. This will make companies more responsible for their users’ safety online, especially children and other vulnerable groups. We will establish in law a new duty of care on companies towards their users, overseen by an independent regulator. This regulator will set clear safety standards, through codes of practice, backed up by mandatory reporting requirements and effective enforcement powers.

At the same time as the White Paper, the Government published the Social Media Code of Practice, which sets out actions that the Government believes providers of social media platforms should take to prevent bullying, insulting, intimidating and humiliating behaviours on their sites.

In addition to providing children with the tools to go online safely, we already expect companies to protect them from inappropriate content. Ahead of the new regulatory framework, we will produce a new, additional draft code of practice focusing specifically on child online safety. The draft code will set our expectations about what is required to keep children safe and will examine existing resources available, including whether specific guidance should be available to parents and carers.