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 prevent online violent images being used as a form of cyber bullying.

The Online Safety Bill will require all in-scope platforms to assess and mitigate the risk of illegal content appearing on their sites, or of their sites being used to facilitate illegal activity. All in-scope platforms will need to design their services to prevent exposure to illegal content and will need to set out in their terms of service how individuals will be protected from illegal content online. In-scope platforms will also need to ensure that they quickly take down illegal content once it has been reported or they become aware of its presence on their services.

Platforms which are likely to be accessed by children will also need to assess the risks their service poses for children, including from harms such as cyberbullying and content depicting or encouraging violence, put in place measures to protect them, and monitor these to ensure they are keeping children safe on their services.

Users will be able to report abuse, and should expect to receive an appropriate response from the platform.

If major platforms don’t fulfil their own standards to keep people safe, they could face an investigation and enforcement action.