Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, if he will put a statutory duty on small websites to prevent putting children at risk of (a) sexual extortion, (b) grooming and (c) generating child sexual abuse images.

The Online Safety Act creates new duties on online services to protect users from being harmed by illegal content and activity. The strongest duties are to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation (CSEA) and to stop child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from being shared. The illegal content duties have been in effect from 17 March. Ofcom is the regulator for the regime and has set out steps providers can take including strong automated content moderation measures and anti-grooming measures. Ofcom will continue to develop their codes iteratively, including measures to detect, prevent and remove CSAM.