Radicalism: Social Media

(asked on 26th June 2019) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps his Department is (a) taking and (b) plans to take to help tackle the number of extreme lslamists operating on (a) Twitter and (b) other social media platforms.


Answered by
Victoria Atkins Portrait
Victoria Atkins
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
This question was answered on 8th July 2019

This Government has been clear there should be no safe space online for terrorists and their supporters to radicalise, recruit, incite, or inspire. The UK has been at the forefront of the online battle against extremist and terrorist material.

The dedicated police Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) refers content that they assess as contravening UK terrorism legislation to industry and have secured the removal of over 310,000 pieces of terrorist material since its inception in February 2010.

The UK Government was instrumental in setting up the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), an industry-led forum, following the 2017 terrorist attacks. We continue to press for the GIFCT to lead a more robust and coordinated cross-industry response to reduce the availability of terrorist content on the internet.

We continue to work with technology companies, including Twitter, to encourage them to take further steps in tackling terrorist material on the Internet. While companies have taken positive steps, the Government has been clear that more needs to be done to tackle online harms, including extremist content. That is why the Government published the Online Harms White Paper, which sets out our plans for world-leading legislation to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online and hold companies to account for tackling a wide range of online harms.

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