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 hold social media platforms accountable for content promoting eating disorders and self-harm on their platforms.

The strongest protections in the Online Safety Bill will be for children. Services in scope of the Bill which are likely to be accessed by children will need to do much more to protect them from harmful content. This includes content promoting eating disorders or self-harm content.

Major platforms will also need to address legal but harmful content accessed by adults.

The Government will set out in secondary legislation priority categories of harmful material for children and adults. If platforms fail in their duties under the Bill, they will face tough enforcement action including fines of up to 10% of global annual qualifying turnover.

The Government asked the Law Commission to review current legislation on harmful online communications. It has now published final recommendations, which includes a proposed new offence to address the encouragement of self-harm. The Government is considering the Law Commission’s recommendations and will set out our position in due course.