Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to support social media companies to eradicate online bullying.
The joint DCMS-Home Office Online Harms White Paper, published on 8 April, sets out the government's plans for world leading legislation to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online. This includes establishing a new statutory duty of care to make companies take more responsibility for the safety of their users. Compliance with this duty of care will be overseen and enforced by an independent regulator. Companies will be held to account for tackling a comprehensive set of online harms, including cyberbullying. Alongside the White Paper, the government also published the Social Media Code of Practice, which sets out actions that the Government believes social media platforms should take to prevent bullying, insulting, intimidating and humiliating behaviours on their sites.