Social media ‘failing to curb extremist content’

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

Social media companies were leaving cyberspace “ungoverned and lawless,” allowing the forums to become the lifeblood of ISIL, a parliamentary report said.

“Huge corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter with their billion-dollar incomes are consciously failing to target this threat,” said Keith Vaz, a senior MP from the opposition Labour party.

The panel said the companies had “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 companies hit back. “We remove content that incites violence, terminate accounts run by terrorist organisations and respond to legal requests to remove content that breaks UK law,” said a spokesman for YouTube, which is owned by Google.

Facebook insisted it dealt “robustly with reports of terrorism-related content”.

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

Twitter said it had closed 360,000 accounts since the middle of last year.