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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of ensuring that regulations requiring social media companies to remove specific content are not applicable to Public Service Broadcasting output.

The Online Safety Bill will ensure content from all public service broadcasters is protected on social media platforms.

The Bill exempts recognised news publishers’ content from tech platforms’ new online safety duties. This means tech companies will be under no legal obligation to apply their new safety duties to that content. The criteria under which an organisation qualifies as a recognised news publisher are set in the Bill. They include the BBC, S4C and other public service broadcasters who publish news-related material.

The largest and riskiest services, Category 1 service providers, will also need to set and enforce policies to ensure that the importance of journalistic content is taken into account when making moderation decisions. This will cover journalistic content published by public service broadcasters.

Parliament has just approved amendments to the Online Safety Bill tabled by the government to further strengthen the protections for recognised news publisher content. Category 1 service providers will be required to notify news publishers and offer them a right of appeal before removing or moderating their content or taking any action against their accounts. This will ensure content from news publishers, including UK public service broadcasters, are not arbitrarily removed at the height of the news cycle. These protections would not apply to news publisher content where this content would give rise to civil or criminal liability for the service, or where it amounts to a relevant offence as defined by the Bill.