Facebook, Twitter ‘failing to curb extremist content’

LONDON // Facebook, Twitter and Google are not doing enough to prevent their social networks from being used by extremists for recruitment, a panel of British lawmakers said on Thursday.

Social media companies are leaving cyberspace “ungoverned and lawless,” allowing the forums to become the lifeblood of ISIL, according to a report by the home affairs committee. Failure to act would lead to the sites becoming “the ‘Wild West’ of the internet”, it warned.

The companies defended themselves against claims that they were failing in their duty, with Facebook insisting it deals “robustly with reports of terrorism-related content”.

The report was published after the number of counter-terrorism arrests in Britain increased 35 per cent between 2010 and 2015, although the country has not seen a mass casualty extremist attack since 2005’s London bombings.

An estimated 800 people with links to Britain have travelled to fight in Syria and Iraq.

Britain’s official international terrorism threat level is currently set at “severe”, which means an attack is considered highly likely.

“Huge corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter with their billion-dollar incomes are consciously failing to target 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 Keith Vaz, a senior MP from the main opposition Labour party who chairs the committee.

“These companies have teams of only a few hundred employees to monitor networks of billions of accounts and Twitter does not even proactively report extremist content to law enforcement agencies,” the committee said.

“If they continue to fail to tackle this issue and allow their platforms to become the ‘Wild West’ of the internet, it will erode their reputations.”

A spokesman for YouTube, which is owned by Google, said it would keep working with Britain’s government to see what more can be done.

“We remove content that incites violence, terminate accounts run by terrorist organisations and respond to legal requests to remove content that breaks UK law,” the spokesman added.

Simon Milner of Facebook UK, said: “Terrorists and the support of terrorist activity are not allowed on Facebook.”

Twitter said last week that it had cut off 235,000 accounts in the last six months, raising the overall figure it had suspended to 360,000 since mid-2015.

* Agence France-Presse and Associated Press