Social media sites told to do more to stop terrorists

The Home Affairs Committee said the social networks have become “the vehicle of choice in spreading propaganda and the recruiting platforms for terrorism”.

Its findings come in a report published after a 12-month inquiry that included visits to Glasgow, Bradford and the EU law enforcement agency Europol.

Cyber-war – using the internet to promote radicalisation and terrorism – is one of the greatest threats that countries including the UK face, said the committee.

In its response, it recommends that the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) should be upgraded into a high-tech, state-of-the-art, round-the-clock, central operational hub.

This would be designed to locate dangers early, move quickly to block them and instantly share sensitive information with other security agencies, representatives of whom should be co-located within CTIRU.

Around 800 UK-linked fighters have travelled to Syria and Iraq since the conflicts began there, and the MPs said half of these foreign fighters were thought to have returned to the UK. Terrorism-related arrests in the UK were 35 per cent higher in 2015 than in 2010.

SNP MP for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East, Stuart McDonald, who sits on the committee, said it was no surprise that extremists were using social networks in the way they were.

“Essentially it is so easy to use social media to contact followers all around the globe,” he said.

“But what’s slightly frustrating for the committee is we got the impression that big companies were taking some action, but they have the capacity to do considerably more.

“It’s not easy – we’re not pretending there’s some magic button they can press to remove extremist content from the internet overnight.

“It will take considerable efforts to make inroads, but it has to be done.”

The committee said that between mid-2015 and February this year, Twitter had suspended more than 125,000 accounts globally that were linked to terrorists, and Google removed over 14 million videos in 2014, which related to all kinds of abuse.

However, MPs admitted these were a drop in the ocean, and added: “They must accept that the hundreds of millions in revenues generated from billions of people using their products need to be accompanied by a greater sense of responsibility and ownership for the impact that extremist material on their sites is having.”

McDonald said: “There have been new rules introduced by the European Union about ensuring cooperation with the internet referral unit there and the committee pointed out the progress that had been made in removing child pornography from the web.

“That’s not been 100 per cent successful and it never will be, but we’ve probably got much further in doing that than we have in attempting to remove extremist content.

“These companies have huge resources and capacity and we got the impression that the balance of the evidence showed that they were doing some things, probably enough to avoid criticism for doing nothing, but they weren’t going at it all guns blazing.

“There has to be some greater transparency about what these companies are doing and the resources that they’re putting into this, so we can then have a proper assessment of what more can be done and can be expected.”

Committee chair Keith Vaz said we were engaged in a war for hearts and minds in the battle against terrorism, and the modern front-line was the internet.

“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,” he said.

“Even when someone is convicted, such as [radical preacher] Anjem Choudary, their videos and hateful speeches continue to influence people through these websites. The companies’ failure to tackle this threat has left some parts of the internet ungoverned, unregulated and lawless.”