Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what further action they intend to take in response to the call by Andrew Parker, Director-General of the British Security Service, to secure the support and cooperation of social media firms to combat the spread of ISIS ideology.

The UK has been at the forefront of the battle against online terrorist material. We have worked closely with a variety of Communications Service Providers (CSPs), including archive sites, to improve their response to terrorist exploitation of their platforms. This has included helping to set up the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), an international, industry-led forum to prevent terrorist use of the internet.

We want to see the GIFCT leading the cross industry response to reduce the availability of terrorist content on the internet, so there are no safe places for terrorists online. This includes removing content within one hour of upload; securing the prevention of re-uploads; and ultimately preventing new content being made available to users in the first place. There is still more to be done in engaging smaller platforms, but we have made a good start.

Separately, on behalf of the Home Office, the Metropolitan Police produces a list of URLs of unlawful terrorist content that have not been removed by CSPs. This list is shared with filtering companies whose products are used across the public estate, such as schools, to establish appropriate levels of filtering, thereby limiting access to terrorist and extremist material.