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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, pursuant to the answer of 11 October to Question 53272 on Social Media: Disinformation, how many times the Counter Disinformation Unit team has referred content to social media platforms in each year since the Unit was set up; and to which companies the content was referred.

The primary purpose of the Counter Disinformation Unit is not to spot every instance of disinformation across all social media platforms, but rather to understand overall trends and coordinated attempts to artificially manipulate the information environment. When the Unit does identify particular pieces of harmful content which may violate platforms’ terms of service these are referred to the relevant platform for consideration, who in turn decide what action to take.

As an operational matter it is not appropriate for the government to publicly provide details of content reported to platforms as doing so would give malign actors insight into our capabilities.