The government shares the Committee’s concerns regarding the amplification of misleading content online and agrees that more evidence is needed to assess the merits of different approaches to tackling misinformation. The government engages with social media companies to make clear their responsibility to keep users safe. We are closely monitoring changes to fact checking models and how they might impact UK users. We agree on the importance of research and evidence in this area and are currently looking at where we can build our evidence base on these issues. On AI driven detection of misinformation, the government ran the Deepfake Detection Challenge last year, bringing together academic, industry and government experts to develop innovative and practical solutions focused on detecting synthetic media. More widely, provisions inserted by the Data (Use and Access) Act empower DSIT’s Secretary of State to create a framework for independent researchers to access online safety data, which will – once implemented - give researchers a legislative footing to conduct their online safety research in the future.