Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what plans she has to introduce fines for social media companies which fail to remove extremist content from their platforms.

This Government has been clear there should be no safe space online for terrorists and their supporters to radicalise, recruit, incite, or inspire. In March 2017, the Home Secretary held a very positive meeting with industry to discuss online terrorist content. Subsequent to the roundtable, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft made a public commitment to look at options for establishing an industry-led forum focused on tackling terrorist and extremist content online.

This was formally announced by the companies on 26 June 2016. We continue to work closely with industry to come up with new, innovative ways for tackling terrorist use of the internet but, as the Prime Minister has made clear, we will also explore the possibility of creating legal requirements for communications service providers if they fail to take the necessary action to remove unacceptable content