February 25, 2019

The House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee has published its final report on Disinformation and “fake news”.

The report calls for:

• a compulsory Code of Ethics for tech companies overseen by an independent regulator;
• the regulator to be given powers to launch legal action against companies that breach the Code;
• the Government to reform current electoral communications laws and rules on overseas involvement in UK elections;
• social media companies to be obliged to take down known sources of harmful content, including proven sources of disinformation.

The report also finds that:

• electoral law is “not fit for purpose”; and
• Facebook intentionally and knowingly violated both data privacy and anti-competition laws.

The report repeats a number of recommendations from the interim report published last summer. The Committee calls for the Government to reconsider a number of recommendations to which it did not respond and to include concrete proposals for action in its forthcoming White Paper on online harms. To access the report in full, click here.