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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, with reference to the article entitled Facebook failing to flag harmful climate misinformation, new research finds, published by the Centre for countering digital hate in February 2022, what assessment her Department has made of the implications for her policies of the findings that Metaverse is unsafe.

The Government takes the issue of mis and disinformation very seriously, including climate misinformation. During the COP-26 Summit last year the cross Whitehall Counter Disinformation Unit brought together monitoring and analysis capabilities and expertise from across Government to understand the scope, scale, and nature of disinformation and misinformation risks to the Summit and worked with partners to tackle it. We are regularly engaging 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.

We are also introducing groundbreaking legislation to help prevent the spread of harmful disinformation. The Online Safety Bill will force companies subject to the safety duties to tackle illegal misinformation and disinformation in scope of the Bill, and protect children from harmful content. The biggest platforms will also need to address legal but harmful content for adults, which will include some types of harmful misinformation and disinformation.

The Bill will apply to all services that allow users to post content online or to interact with each other, regardless of whether users interact through online forums or as avatars in a digital environment. This includes the Metaverse. However, we expect companies to take steps now to improve safety, and not wait for the legislation to come into force before acting.