Firms urged to boycott web giants over terror content

INTERNET giants should be boycotted by advertisers if they continue to host vile extremist material online, a report into last year’s terror attacks says.

Social media and web companies have not made sufficient changes to ‘stop their systems being used as a safe haven for extremists and terrorists,’ according to the intelligence and security committee.

The parliamentary watchdog said appealing to web giants’ ‘social responsibility’ had not worked, and the Government should lobby business leaders to pull on ‘financial levers’ by threatening to withdraw advertising. The report described the problem of terrorists using social media as ‘vast’.

Salman Abedi reportedly learned how to make explosive devices after watching online tutorials. Extremist material online may also have been a factor in radicalising the attackers at London Bridge and Westminster.

The report said that since the problem was first raised four years ago, web giants had started to ‘engage more with this issue’, but this had led to ‘little tangible progress’. MI5 and counter-terror police are unable to tackle the problem alone, and web giants must take the lead in identifying and removing material from their platforms, it said.

The security services told the committee this would enable them to concentrate on investigations rather than ‘spending all of our time effectively being an editor for someone else’s publishing house’.

The report said more businesses should follow the example of consumer goods giant Unilever, which in February threatened to boycott Facebook and Google unless they more efficiently policed extremist and illegal content.