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Written Question
Radicalism: Social Media
Tuesday 7th July 2015

Asked by: Lord Balfe (Conservative - Life peer)

Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps are being taken to prevent online social media platforms such as Twitter being used by terrorist organisations such as ISIS to spread propaganda and to radicalise and recruit vulnerable Europeans.

Answered by Lord Bates

We are working with responsible social media companies to take robust action against terrorist material from groups like ISIL. Since 2010, over 95,000 pieces of terrorist-related material have been removed at the request of the dedicated Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit.

We are also working with Europol and other EU member states to set up an EU-Internet Referral Unit, based on the British model – this is now up and running in pilot form and will assist with the volumes of terrorist and extremist content online, in a number of European languages.

We want industry to go further and see them employ a zero tolerance approach to terrorist activity on their networks. We will continue encouraging companies to produce industry standards for the identification, removal and referral of terrorist activity.