Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment he has made of the potential feasibility of setting up a dedicated unit to focus on disrupting (a) Bitmasks and (b) other online platforms that have the potential to spread (i) antisemitism and (ii) radicalisation.

The Online Safety Act recently received Royal Assent. Under the Online Safety Act tech companies will be accountable to an independent regulator, Ofcom, to keep their users safe. Platforms will be required to take action to prevent the proliferation of illegal content online, including terrorist content, and ensure their services are not used for offending. This means that companies will need to mitigate the risk that their services are used for illegal activity or to share illegal content. Ofcom will have a tough suite of enforcement powers to use against companies who fail to fulfil their duties.

The Home Office builds relationships with a range of online platforms to tackle online harms including to reduce the availability and accessibility of radicalising content online. It would not be appropriate to comment on the specific status of our relationships with individual companies at this time.

The Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) identifies, assesses and refers online content that is in breach of UK terrorism legislation to tech companies for removal, in accordance with platforms’ terms and conditions.

The Government stays abreast of developments in technology and the way in which technology is exploited for harm, in order to adapt Government’s approach to tackling online harms, where appropriate.

This Government is clear that all forms of hate crime, including antisemitism, are completely unacceptable and we are committed to tackling these abhorrent offences. The Government is clear that online offending is as serious as offline offending, which is why we fund the National Online Hate Crime Hub, a central capability designed to support individual local police forces in dealing with online hate crime.