An amendment to the upcoming Online Safety Bill will include tougher protections for journalism, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has announced.

The amendment is designed to guard against the “arbitrary removal of articles” from journalists at recognised news outlets when shared on social media.

Figures from Ofcom suggest that half of UK adults use social media for news, with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram the most popular platforms.

But the government says that news content is deliberately removed or made less visible by social media moderators or algorithms for unclear reasons.

“Our democracy depends on people’s access to high quality journalism and our world-leading internet safety law brings in tough new safeguards for freedom of speech and the press online,” said digital secretary Nadine Dorries. “Yet we’ve seen tech firms arbitrarily remove legitimate journalism with a complete lack of transparency and this could seriously impact public discourse. These extra protections will stop that from happening.”

The existing bill did not include any rules to stop platforms from removing news publishers’ content or making it less visible if they decided to review it for potential breaches of their terms and conditions, even if they eventually found no fault with it.

Under the new rules, Category 1 companies - including the largest and most popular social media platforms - will now be required to ensure recognised news publishers’ articles remain viewable and accessible on their sites even if they are under review by moderators.

They will be required to notify news publishers and offer them a right of appeal before removing or moderating their content or taking any action against their accounts.

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