Social Media: Hate Crime

(asked on 5th January 2022) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps her Department plans to take to tackle hate speech on (a) Twitter and (b) other social media platforms to ensure that comments are removed in addition to users banned.


Answered by
Chris Philp Portrait
Chris Philp
Minister of State (Home Office)
This question was answered on 11th January 2022

Under the draft Online Safety Bill, services in scope will need to minimise and remove illegal content, including illegal hate speech. Services in scope which are likely to be accessed by children will also need to protect them from harmful or inappropriate content.

Major platforms will also need to address legal but harmful content for adults. These services will have to set out clearly what legal content is acceptable on their platforms and enforce their terms and conditions consistently and transparently. This could include removal of prohibited content, banning repeat offenders and preventing them from creating new accounts. Priority categories of legal but harmful content for adults will be set out in secondary legislation and these are likely to include some forms of abuse, including racist abuse.

If platforms fail in their duties under the Bill, they will face tough enforcement action including fines of up to 10% of global annual qualifying turnover.

The draft Bill has been subject to pre-legislative scrutiny by a Joint Committee which reported its recommendations on 14 December. We are considering the Committee’s report and will introduce the Bill as soon as possible.

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