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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, whether the Government plans to include content about age-restricted products including e-cigarettes in designation of content that is harmful to children in the Online Safety Bill.

The strongest protections in the Online Safety Bill are for children. All services in scope will need to do far more to protect children from illegal content and activity, including illegal content about age-restricted products. Services will have to remove and limit the spread of illegal content and take steps to prevent similar material from appearing.

Services likely to be accessed by children will also have to take steps to protect them from content and activity that falls below the criminal threshold but presents a significant risk of harm to children. The government will set out in secondary legislation categories of priority harmful content.

For content to be designated as priority harmful content, it will have to meet the Bill’s threshold for harm and be content of a kind which presents a material risk of significant harm to an appreciable number of children or adults in the UK. On July 7 2022 the government published an indicative list of content that it considers reaches this threshold and is minded to designate as priority harmful content.

This may not be an exhaustive list and we are continuing to engage extensively with stakeholders, parliamentarians and Ofcom ahead of designating the categories. In addition to the priority harms, companies will also be required to protect children from any other content and activity on their service which risks causing significant harm to an appreciable number of children.