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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps his Department is taking to ensure social media companies tackle the spread of misinformation on the covid-19 vaccine on their platforms.

The Government takes the issue of misinformation and disinformation very seriously. That is why we stood up the Counter Disinformation Unit up on 5 March to bring together cross-Government monitoring and analysis capabilities.

We are working closely with social media platforms to help them identify and remove incorrect claims about the virus, particularly around the vaccine, and to promote authoritative information. Vaccine misinformation is harmful and it is everyone's responsibility to access information from authoritative sources and not share false or misleading information.

In a meeting with the Digital Secretary and Health Secretary last month, social media companies agreed to continue to work with public health bodies to ensure that authoritative messages about vaccine safety reach as many people as possible; to commit to swifter responses to flagged content; and to commit to the principle that no user or company should directly profit from COVID-19 vaccine mis/disinformation.