UK Home Affairs Committee accuses Facebook, Twitter and YouTube of ‘consciously failing’ to curb extremism

According to a report of the UK Home Affairs Committee, Social media companies ‘are consciously failing to combat the use of their sites to promote terrorism and killings’, and it demands a ‘zero tolerance approach to online extremism’. Representatives of technology companies have questioned the results of the report, as they claim they have developed extensive counter-extremism strategies. According to radicalisation expert Peter Neumann, ‘social media companies are doing a lot more now that they used to’, and ‘the vast majority of ISIS recruits that have gone to Syria from Britain and other European countries have been recruited via peer to peer interaction, not through the internet alone’. In short, ‘blaming Facebook, Google, or Twitter for this phenomenon is quite simplistic, and I’d even say misleading’.