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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of Twitter's rules in curbing harmful content and abuse.

The Online Harms White Paper sets out our plans for world-leading legislation to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online. This will make companies more responsible for their users' safety online. We intend to establish in law a new duty of care on companies towards their users, overseen by an independent regulator.

The regulator will publish codes of practice, which will set out in detail the steps that companies should take to fulfill their duty of care. We envisage that, where relevant, companies will ensure their terms and conditions meet standards set by the regulator and reflect the codes of practice as appropriate. Relevant terms and conditions will be required to be sufficiently clear and accessible, including to children and other vulnerable users. The regulator will assess how effectively these terms are enforced as part of any regulatory action.

Ahead of the implementation of the new regulatory framework, we continue to encourage companies to take early action to address online harms.