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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what plans he has to include provisions to ensure cross-platform co-operation in combating online harms in the Online Safety Bill announced in the Queen's Speech 2021.

The Online Safety Bill will address harmful content shared across multiple services in several ways. Ofcom will have a duty to publish a risk assessment identifying risks to individuals on regulated services. This will cover risks associated with the cross platform nature of harms.

Companies will need to assess whether these harms are likely to appear on their services and mitigate the risks of them doing so. Ofcom will set out details on how this can be achieved in codes of practice. Where appropriate, these will include measures to address cross-platform harms and could include cooperation between platforms.

Ofcom will also undertake research and horizon-scanning to spot any cross-platform emerging issues, backed up by robust information gathering powers. It will have a role in sharing best practice on mitigation amongst service providers. This will drive improvements in the ways service providers identify and tackle these issues.

In addition, the super-complaints process will enable organisations to submit evidence of systemic issues that are causing harm to certain groups across multiple services, which Ofcom will review.