Digital Economy Bill

We are working on codes of practice in a series of different areas. About 10 days ago, as my right hon. Friend will have seen, Twitter—one of the main players in this space—brought forward work towards a code of practice on online abuse. There is more to do in this area, but it is better that we have codes of practice that the organisations themselves can buy into and that can change with the times as the usage of social media changes. My goodness, we all know how social media changes over time—not always in a good way—so we need to make sure that we keep pace with that. I worry that putting something static into legislation would get into the way of such efforts. However, I agree with my right hon. Friend that it is incumbent on social media companies to play their part in establishing and rigorously enforcing norms and social responsibility in this area if we decide not to go down, or not yet to go down, the legislative route.