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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to encourage social media platforms to suspend the accounts of the political leaders from (1) Russia, and (2) Belarus.

The Government has been working closely with the major social media platforms to monitor and share information as the situation in Ukraine develops. We have made clear the seriousness of the current situation and the importance of cooperating speedily in countering these threats. This includes the social media platforms swiftly removing disinformation and coordinated inauthentic or manipulated behaviour which is against their terms of service and promoting authoritative content.

We welcome the decisions of major platforms, including Meta, Twitter and YouTube, to restrict posts, accounts and/or advertisements run by Russian state media. As the Secretary of State set out in her statement to Parliament on 3 March, we will continue to work with these platforms to counter Russia’s aggression and support the people fighting for their survival in Ukraine.

More widely, the cross-Whitehall Counter Disinformation Unit brings together monitoring and analysis capabilities from across Government to understand the scope, scale, and nature of disinformation and misinformation and to work with partners to tackle it. We regularly engage with social media platforms to flag content that we consider to be particularly harmful. Where this content breaches their own terms and conditions, we expect platforms to remove it promptly.