Sarah Newton
Main Page: Sarah Newton (Conservative - Truro and Falmouth)Department Debates - View all Sarah Newton's debates with the Cabinet Office
(9 years, 9 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
That is a very difficult question. We do not have an entirely voluntary approach with social media companies. We passed a law through this House, the so-called DRIPA legislation—the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014—so that we can enforce the extraterritoriality of our desire to see the data and content of communications between potential terrorists. We have that legal power because of the work we have done during this Parliament. The point I made in my statement, and which I will continue to make, is that getting organisations such as Twitter, Facebook and Google to help us, where possible, to combat terrorist extremism voluntarily—by taking down pages with extremist content, and revealing to us people whom they think might be at risk of radicalisation, extremism or worse—is all to the good, but when it comes to combating terrorism, we have legal remedies as well.
Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)
The Government have made real progress in this Parliament in raising awareness and preventing the online sexual exploitation of young British people. Will my right hon. Friend commit to putting just as much effort into preventing the radicalisation and recruitment of young British people into these hateful terrorist organisations?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is interesting that when we started down the path of saying to internet companies that they must help us to get child pornography and disgusting child sex pictures off the internet, the response was, “We’re not responsible for what people look for; we’re not responsible for doing anything other than supporting free speech.” To be fair to those organisations, they have moved miles from that position. They have now banned something like 40,000 repulsive search terms: if people plug them into their computer, they will get a nil return on them. They have done that not just in Britain, but all over the world. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that we now need to get them to apply the same thinking to the problems of extremist violence and terrorism. There are some differences, but I am quite clear that if we ask companies to employ some social responsibility, they can work with us to take down even more pages than they do today.