London (McKoy’s News) – PM’s Condemnation of Tech Firms Criticised: Prime Minister Theresa May has been warned that her promise to tighten regulation on tech firms after the London attacks will not work.
Tech Firms Criticised: Mrs. May said areas of the internet must be closed because tech giants provided a “safe space” for terrorist ideology.
But the Open Rights Group said social media firms were not the problem, while an expert in radicalisation branded her criticism “intellectually lazy”.
Twitter, Facebook, and Google said they were working hard to fight extremism.
Google (which owns Youtube) Facebook (which owns WhatsApp) and Twitter were among tech companies already facing pressure to tackle extremist content – pressure that intensified on Sunday.
Mrs. May said: “We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed.”
“Yet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies… provide.”
On ITV’s Peston on Sunday, Home Secretary Amber Rudd said an international agreement was needed for social media companies to do more to stop radicalisation.
“One (requirement) is to make sure they do more to take down the material that is radicalising people,” Mrs. Rudd said.
“And secondly, to help work with us to limit the amount of end-to-end encryption that otherwise terrorists can use,” she said.
But the Open Rights Group, which campaigns for privacy and free speech online, warned that politicians risked pushing terrorists’ “vile networks” into the “darker corners of the web” by more regulation.
Contributed by Dr. Colin O Jarrett