MPs lash out at tech giants
Google, Facebook and Twitter have come under fire over their failure to tackle extremism online.
Members of the Home Affairs Select Committee blamed the tech giants for “consciously failing” to stop the spread of hateful content.
“Huge corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter, with their billion dollar incomes, are consciously failing to tackle this threat and passing the buck by hiding behind their supranational legal status, despite knowing that their sites are being used by the instigators of terror,” said MP and chair of the committee Keith Vaz.
The report stated: “We need to win the cyber-war with terrorist and extremist organisations. We recommend that CTIRU is upgraded into a high-tech, state-of-the-art round the-clock central Operational Hub which locates the perils early, moves quickly to block them and is able to instantly share the sensitive information with other security agencies.”
A spokesperson for YouTube, which is owned by Google, said: We take our role in combating the spread of extremist material very seriously.
“We remove content that incites violence, terminate accounts run by terrorist organisations and respond to legal requests to remove content that breaks UK law. We’ll continue to work with government and law enforcement authorities to explore what more can be done to tackle radicalisation.”
Facebook’s UK director of policy Simon Milner said: “As I made clear in my evidence session, terrorists and the support of terrorist activity are not allowed on Facebook and we deal swiftly and robustly with reports of terrorism-related content.
“In the rare instances that we identify accounts or material as terrorist, we’ll also look for and remove relevant associated accounts and content.”
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