Home Secretary Amber Rudd will travel to Silicon Valley this week to urge media platforms to increase efforts to crack down on online violent content encouraging terrorism.
Social media platforms, such as Twitter (NYSE:TWTR), YouTube and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), have been scrutinised for the role that they potentially have terrorist activity and violence. Theresa May has urged such platforms to take a tougher stance on the issue.
In June, the Prime Minister said that online technology firms were not doing enough and stricter regulation that would “deprive the extremists of their safe spaces online”.
“We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed – yet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide,” she said, after the London Bridge terror attack.
A spokesperson for Facebook has commented on the issue, saying they already use “a combination of technology and human review” and works “aggressively to remove terrorist content”.
Similarly, a Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) spokesperson said the company is “working with industry colleagues on an international forum to accelerate and strengthen our existing work in this area”. Twitter said that it continues “to expand the use of technology as part of a systematic approach to removing this type of content”.
Rudd will attend a meeting for Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a group which internet companies Facebook, Google, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Twitter set up themselves to address efforts to remove terrorist content from platforms.
The objective of the group is to “help us continue to make our hosted consumer services hostile to terrorists and violent extremists.”
The Investigatory Powers Act 2016, or “Snooper’s Charter”, was introduced across the UK last year. The controversial act increased spying abilities of agencies and the Government on the internet.