Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent estimate she has made of the number of (a) internet users in the UK accessing violent misogynistic content online and (b) posts online promoting violent misogyny.

The Home Office invests in research and analysis to better understand the scale and challenge of violent online misogyny. However, it is difficult to provide a reliable estimate of the number of users accessing violent misogynistic content or the number of posts online promoting violent misogyny as this content is found across a broad range of platforms, including mainstream and closed spaces, and is often the subject of moderation by the platforms, or attempts by users to circumvent detection.

The Online Safety Bill will mean that alongside removing illegal content, companies must be clear and transparent in their terms and conditions on which types of legal content they will allow on their platforms and uphold this consistently. If a platform does not allow hateful or abusive speech, they must remove this content when they become aware of it. Companies will be held to account by Ofcom and could face significant fines if they fail to fulfil their duties to protect users.