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 enhance online safety.

In May we published the Online Safety Bill in draft. This is a major milestone in the development of a new regulatory framework to keep users safe online. For the first time, tech companies are going to be accountable to an independent regulator to keep their users safe. The draft bill will be subject to pre-legislative scrutiny in this session, with the Joint Committee due to report by 10 December.

We are also taking steps to educate and empower users to make more informed and safer choices online. In July we published the first government Online Media Literacy Strategy, which sets out the government’s approach to improving media literacy capabilities among internet users in England. The Media Literacy Strategy will promote media literacy as a complementary tool to the new regulatory regime, providing coordination to the main organisations seeking to empower users with the skills and knowledge they need to stay safe online.