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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps her Department is taking to increase public awareness of deepfakes.

The Government takes seriously the threat of disinformation and online manipulation which includes digitally manipulated content such as deepfakes. Building public awareness and resilience is a key part of our whole society approach to tackling the threat.

Last year, the government published the Online Media Literacy Strategy, setting out our plans to support the empowerment of citizens with the skills and knowledge they need to make safe and informed choices online. This includes supporting citizens to: critically think about online content, understand how the online environment works including how images can be manipulated, and understand that the online world is not always reflective of reality.

In April 2022 we published our £2.5 million year two Action Plan setting out our work programme to meet the ambition of the Strategy. This included launching the Media Literacy Programme Fund which will award grant funding to organisations undertaking activity to build citizens' resilience to misinformation and disinformation. We have committed to publishing future actions plans each Financial Year until March 2025.