Social media companies including Facebook and Twitter are “consciously failing” at keeping its services free from extremist content as terror groups like the Islamic State continue to use those platforms for recruitment purposes, British lawmakers said Thursday.
Along with Google’s YouTube, the social media titans are singled out by name in a report on radicalization released by the U.K. Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee this week following a year-long investigation launched to examine the recruitment efforts of various terrorist organizations, particularly Islamic State.
While the report acknowledge that “The use of the Internet to promote radicalization and terrorism is one of the greatest threats that countries including the U.K. face,” its authors accuse the companies behind those services of coming up short with respect to restricting access for extremists.
“Social media companies are consciously failing to combat the use of their sites to promote terrorism and killings. Networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the vehicle of choice in spreading propaganda and they have become the recruiting platforms for terrorism. They must accept that the hundreds of millions in revenues generated from billions of people using their products needs to be accompanied by a greater sense of responsibility and ownership for the impact that extremist material on their sites is having,” the lawmakers wrote.
“It is therefore alarming that these companies have teams of only a few hundred employees to monitor networks of billions of accounts and that Twitter does not even proactively report extremist content to law enforcement agencies,” the report continued. “These companies are hiding behind their supranational legal status to pass the parcel of responsibility and refusing to act responsibly in case they damage their brands. If they continue to fail to tackle this issue and allow their platforms to become the ’Wild West’ of the internet, then it will erode their reputation as responsible operators.”
The release of the committee’s report comes less than a week after Twitter said in an announcement of its own that it has suspended around 360,000 users during the last year for violating its rules against promoting violence and terrorism, including around 235,000 accounts since it last provided statistics in February 2016.
“Since that announcement, the world has witnessed a further wave of deadly, abhorrent terror attacks across the globe. We strongly condemn these acts and remain committed to eliminating the promotion of violence or terrorism on our platform,” Twitter said last week.
Representatives for YouTube and Facebook defended their policies when reached following the report’s release.
“We take our role in combatting the spread of extremist material very seriously. We remove content that incites violence, terminate accounts run by terrorist organizations and respond to legal requests to remove content that breaks UK law. We’ll continue to work with Government and law enforcement authorities to explore what more can be done to tackle radicalization,” a spokesperson for YouTube told CNBC in an email.
“Online extremism can only be tackled with a strong partnership between policymakers, civil society, academia and companies. For years we have been working closely with experts to support counter speech initiatives, encouraging people to use Facebook and other online platforms to condemn terrorist activity and to offer moderate voices in response to extremist ones,” added Simon Milner, director of policy for Facebook in the U.K.
Nonetheless, parliamentarians said internet companies should increase the number of employees tasked with purging extremist content from its services and publish quarterly figures concerning the number of accounts deactivated and the reasons why.
“In short, what cannot appear legally in the print or broadcast media, namely inciting hatred and terrorism, should not be allowed to appear on social media,” its authors said.
A report published last month by Fordham Law School’s Center on National Security said around 9-in-10 of the 101 terrorism cases opened by U.S. prosecutors between March 2014 and June 2016 involved suspects who used social media.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.