faster and further action to combat the use of their services by terrorists, criminals and their supporters"[1]—it failed to propose a substantive way forward.
265. By the time of the Committee's Inquiry into the 2017 terror attacks,[2] the Director General of MI5 was able to confirm to the Committee that some progress had been made in the intervening years, in that at least the CSPs were acknowledging they had a role to play: "Companies are no longer overtly denying all responsibility for material they carry. They were doing that five years ago."[3] However, the Committee once again found itself in familiar territory when it came to examining the issue of whether CSPs were taking active steps to ensure that law enforcement agencies were notified of any material that may have a national security element. It transpired that although the major CSPs were now developing algorithms that would detect harmful content automatically, as the Head of CTP told the Committee, the utility of this was somewhat negated by the fact that it prevented any onward reporting to law enforcement:
the automation also means that it is kind of like a dump into your trash bin where it doesn't go through any kind of human eye and, if it doesn't go through any kind of human eye they cannot spot the fact that that might be something the police or Security Service might be interested in.[4]
266. Homeland Security Group advised that, while the CSPs have the technical capacity to engage in this area, it is a "much more sophisticated set of propaganda than we have experienced in the past", and that ERWT material was sometimes difficult for the CSPs to detect. The Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) had a critical role to play in ensuring that the CSPs were proactively looking for this material on their platforms. The Head of CTP provided detail on the number of referrals the CTIRU were now making that were linked to ERWT, and how they were still developing a knowledge base which would help to inform decision-making with regard to whether online material breached Terrorism Act 2000 (TACT) thresholds:
I can give you some sense of perspective from the CTIRU point of view for 2020. Only six per cent of our total referrals in that year were in the Right Wing Extremism space. That amounts to 192 referrals with Right Wing material and, of the total referred, 58 of those breached TACT . . . we are learning what this stuff means all of the time and we are trying to develop a library that we have spent three decades building up in the Islamist space and we are trying to develop that at pace now.
By doing that we can go to social media sites, CSPs, who do want to cooperate with us, do want stuff taken down, or do want to assess whether it breaches their terms and conditions and say this is the material that we think is either illegal, in which case every respectable social media outfit I know wants it taken down, or it is a matter for you, but we are saying this stuff is inciteful and potentially egregious.[5]
- ↑ Government Response to ISC report on Intelligence on the Murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby, Cm 9012, February 2015.
- ↑ The 2017 Attacks: What needs to change?, HC 1694, 22 November 2018.
- ↑ Oral evidence - MI5, 8 March 2015.
- ↑ Oral evidence - CTP, 8 March 2018.
- ↑ 331 Oral evidence - CTP, 28 April 2021.
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