Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the adequacy of Facebook’s complaints process for reporting hate crimes.

As outlined in the Online Harms White Paper, we intend to establish in law a new ‘duty of care’ on companies towards their users. The ‘duty of care’ will ensure companies have appropriate systems and processes in place to deal with harmful content, which includes hate crime, on their services to keep their users safe. The ‘duty of care’ will apply to companies that provide services which facilitate the sharing of user generated content or user interactions, for example through comments, forums or video sharing.

Companies will be required to have effective and proportionate user redress mechanisms which will enable users to report harmful content and to challenge content takedown where necessary. This will give users clearer, more effective and more accessible avenues to question content takedown, which is an important safeguard for the right to freedom of expression. These processes will need to be transparent, in line with terms and conditions, and consistently applied.