Lord Blencathra – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Blencathra on 2016-09-06.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to introduce criminal sanctions against social media companies and their managers in the UK who refuse to take down tweets, pages or other content supporting terrorism, hate crime or radical Islam.

Baroness Williams of Trafford

HMG has developed strong collaborative relationships with Communications Service Providers (CSPs) which has led to the voluntary removal of over 200,000 pieces of terrorist-related content via referrals from the police Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) since 2010. The government continue to work with CSPs to encourage them to take more responsibility voluntarily for tackling terrorist and extremist content on their own platforms and, in certain circumstances, reporting terrorist content (for example, where there may be an imminent threat to life) to UK law enforcement when they become aware of it.

As most CSPs are international organisations based outside the UK and most online material is hosted outside the UK, national legislation has little application hence our focus on voluntary removals through companies’ terms and conditions. These arrangements mean that where companies take action this removes access to the content from the whole platform world-wide, not just for users accessing it from within a particular jurisdiction.