UK may use taxes to get tech giants to do more to fight extremism, security minister says

Britain may impose new taxes on tech giants such as Google and Facebook unless they do more to combat online extremism by taking down material aimed at radicalizing people or helping them to prepare attacks, Security Minister Ben Wallace said on Sunday.

He accused tech firms of being happy to sell people’s data but not to give it to the government, which was being forced to spend vast sums on deradicalization programs, surveillance and other counterterrorism measures.

“If they continue to be less than cooperative, we should look at things like tax as a way of incentivizing them or compensating for their inaction,” Wallace told the Sunday Times newspaper in an interview.

His quotes did not give further details on tax plans. The newspaper said any demand would take the form of a windfall tax similar to that imposed on privatized utilities by former prime minister Tony Blair’s government in 1997.

Wallace accused the tech giants of putting private profit before public safety.

“We should stop pretending that because they sit on beanbags in T-shirts they are not ruthless profiteers,” he said. “They will ruthlessly sell our details to loans and soft-porn companies but not give it to our democratically elected government.”

Facebook executive Simon Milner rejected the criticisms.

“Mr. Wallace is wrong to say that we put profit before safety, especially in the fight against terrorism,” he said in an emailed statement. “We’ve invested millions of pounds in people and technology to identify and remove terrorist content.”

YouTube, which is owned by Google, said it was doing more every day to tackle violent extremism.

“Over the course of 2017 we have made significant progress through investing in machine-learning technology, recruiting more reviewers, building partnerships with experts and collaboration with other companies,” a YouTube spokeswoman said.

DEADLY ATTACKS

Britain suffered a series of attacks by Islamic terrorists between March and June last year that killed a total of 36 people, excluding the attackers.

Two involved vehicles ramming people on bridges in London, followed by attackers stabbing people. The deadliest, a bombing at a concert in the northern city of Manchester, killed 22 people.

Following the second bridge attack, Prime Minister Theresa May proposed beefing up regulations on cyberspace, and Interior Minister Amber Rudd traveled to California weeks later to ask Silicon Valley to step up efforts against extremism.

“We are more vulnerable than at any point in the last 100 years,” Wallace said, citing extremist material on social media and encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp as tools that made life too easy for terrorists. “Because content is not being taken down as quickly as they could do, we’re having to deradicalize people who have been radicalized. That’s costing millions. They can’t get away with that, and we should look at all the options, including tax.”

Facebook said it removed 83% of uploaded copies of terrorist content within one hour of its being found on the social-media network. It also highlighted plans to double the number of people working in its safety and security teams to 20,000 by the end of 2018.

YouTube said progress in machine learning meant that 83% of violent extremist content was removed without the need for users to flag it.