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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which social media companies have signed up to the Government code of conduct for social media platforms.

The Government published the Social Media Code of Practice in April 2019. This statutory guidance sets out actions that social media platforms should take to prevent bullying, insulting, intimidating and humiliating behaviours on their sites. The Code is also relevant to other sites hosting user-generated content and comments.

While many social media companies will meet some of the standards set out in the Code of Practice, the Government has been clear that voluntary action to date has not gone far enough and there is not enough transparency about the effectiveness of different measures. In April we published the Online Harms White Paper, which set out our plans for world-leading legislation to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online. We intend to establish in law a new duty of care on companies towards their users, overseen by an independent regulator. The new regulatory framework will ensure that there is effective oversight of companies’ action to tackle harmful content online.