Online Harms

Kanishka Narayan Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (Kanishka Narayan)]

I thank the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom) for bringing this important debate to the House. A number of hon. Members have mentioned bereaved families, and I want to pay tribute to all those families. Ian Russell—with whom I have had a series of meetings, including this morning—Stuart and Amanda Stephens, Ellen Roome and so many others have gone through the most horrific of tragedies, and despite that, they have consistently fought for appropriate action for other families. I carry them in my heart and mind when I think about the prospect of online safety regulation doing justice to future generations of children in this country.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire and to the other Members who made contributions on this important topic. In the interest of time, I propose to prioritise responses to them individually before talking about the wider context. First and foremost, I thank the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire for doing a stocktake of progress on the child safety and illegal content duties so far. He will be aware that Ofcom is due to report on content harmful to children and progress on that question this year. I understand that will be due by October, and I look forward to its findings to assess where we can go further still.

The only other thing I will flag to the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire is that the national consultation we have launched on children’s wellbeing includes the question of functionality limitations. The functionalities that he talked about—algorithmic recommendations and the structural aspects that make parts of social media particularly harmful to children—will be in scope. I would very much welcome his submissions on that as well.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon and Consett (Liz Twist) for her consistent advocacy on this question, and for the roundtable she held with the Mental Health Foundation and the Molly Rose Foundation, which I was glad to attend. I thank her for not just shining a light and keeping a consistent focus across the House on the scale of the problem, but flagging the diversity of views on how we should tackle it most effectively. I have been in schools pretty much every week since the launch of the consultation. I was with young people just this morning, and I will be in a school next week. She is right to raise the diversity and depth of views held on how we act, not whether we act.

My hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon and Consett raised concerns about the suicide forum, which my hon. Friend the Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy (Melanie Ward) also mentioned. I share those concerns, and I have engaged with Ofcom to ensure that it is acting quickly and robustly. I had a meeting with one of the bereaved families just this morning. I will continue to ensure that Ofcom does everything it can with the powers it has, and that we continue to look at any further powers required to ensure we act robustly to prevent any such incidents happening again. I would, of course, be delighted to meet my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon and Consett to continue that conversation.

I have had the privilege of engaging with the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) on the illegal sale of drugs; I know that she has been, quite rightly, actively advocating on that question. She will be aware that it has been deemed a priority offence. Ofcom is closely monitoring compliance. I know there is more to do; she has made that point very firmly to me. I will also inform her that the National Crime Agency is looking to identify offenders operating online, both nationally and internationally. She made a very important point on covert filming, and we will take what she raised into consideration. Systems that are designed to remove such content will now have to do so within 48 hours of non-consensual intimate images being put up online. I will continue to look at the implementation of that measure once it comes into force.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Dr Sullivan) raised very important points about the impact of social media usage on brain development, which is one motivating factor for our consultation. We are looking at not just acute harms, but the chronic impact over time of engagement on social media. I am grateful to her for raising the point that there is a suite of options that might be appropriate. I very much share her intent that, at the heart of it, the action we take will make platforms, not young people, responsible for the harms being conducted online.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton North (Mrs Blundell) for advocating on the questions of misinformation and community cohesion, both in her community and nationally. On her point about misinformation and the erosion of public trust, which was also made by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer), there is a very clear foreign interference offence in the Online Safety Act. I will continue to look at the implementation of that. Alongside that, I serve on the defending democracy taskforce with the Security Minister. This is a priority question that we have been looking at. I will continue to ensure that we do more to press the enforcement of existing law and to look at where we can go further still.

Both my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton North and my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Paul Waugh) raised important points about community cohesion, and how we must use online experiences not to divide but to unite our communities. In that context, we have taken a series of initiatives on media literacy to support the ability to sift fact from fiction across our communities. The foreign interference provisions in the Online Safety Act are also a key vector of enforcement against the causes described.

On antisocial behaviour, I would be interested, in the light of the consultation, to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy about where the headteachers and young people she has engaged with think we ought to go. I agree with her on the divisive impacts, and we will continue to look not just at illegal content but at how we empower users in relation to divisive content that, individually, might be legal but, collectively, ends up being deeply harmful to community cohesion, as well as to democratic integrity.

My hon. Friend the Member for Reading Central (Matt Rodda) reaffirmed the point that he has made to me in person about this issue. I pay tribute again to Stuart and Amanda Stephens, who have gone through the most horrific tragedy in their family. I am deeply grateful for their grit and resilience through it, and for my hon. Friend’s advocacy alongside them. He asked me for a sense of direction on where the consultation is going. I will not pre-empt its substantive content, but we have had almost 25,000 responses—I hope and expect that this will be the most engaged-with consultation in the history of British national consultations—including thousands of young people. We have designed a dedicated version of the consultation for young people as well as one for parents and carers. I am keen to hear my hon. Friend’s views from his engagement, as well as those of other Members.

My hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale raised a very important point about the documentary “Inside The Manosphere”, the growing cause of misogyny in this country and this Government’s priority of tackling violence against women and girls. He will be aware that in December, we published our landmark cross-Government violence against women and girls strategy. That was the underpinning force for our making cyber-flashing and intimate image abuse priority offences in this country, banning the creation of nudification apps and banning people from creating and sharing that content, and it is why we are going further still in ensuring that such content is taken down robustly and quickly, within 48 hours. On the point that he and my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton North raised about the growing prevalence of antisemitism and division online, I look forward to an imminent meeting with the Antisemitism Policy Trust to figure out how we can go further not just in law but in terms of awareness of it across our communities.

I turn to the contribution from the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Winchester (Dr Chambers). I have met the Liberal Democrat Front-Bench team to talk about their suggestions on functionalities and age ratings. I would of course be happy to continue the conversation, and I encourage them to contribute to the consultation.

Finally, the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge, raised a very important point about chatbots. I hope it is very clear that chatbots ought never to replace professional support. We will continue to look at that, and I will update the House when we have decided on specific steps. We announced just yesterday that we are looking at the issues of labelling and personality rights, and I hope to update the House on them soon.