Terrorism and the Internet … A duality of progress and free blood

Sir Mark Rowley, who headed the anti-terror police in the UK until earlier this year, threw a bombshell when he accused social media firms of failing to alert police to any suspicious terrorist activity on their platforms for four years.

He added in an interview with a British newspaper that this is about time these firms faced financial penalties.
Rowley said these firms' failure to pass on information had been “wholly irresponsible” and put lives at risk.
In nearly four years leading police counter-terrorism efforts, Rowley said, I saw zero proactive reports of suspicious behavior to us by any of these companies.
"This is irresponsible," he said.
He added that when a social media firm finds someone sharing the most gruesome terrorism material or bomb-making instructions and then cancels their account, they do not tell the police.
"This makes the work of police and MI5 more difficult and endangers the public’s safety," Rowley said.

Methodological differences
Rowley's comments followed the submission of a report early this week by the Intelligence and Security Committee of MPs which called on businesses to pull adverts from tech firms that failed to remove terror or extremist material.
Some people said, however, such claims aimed at reducing pressure on counterterrorism agencies, especially when Rowley was still in office.
Nevertheless, some people are conceding the presence of a real crisis, given the use of social media on a massive scale by terrorist groups.
This is particularly true to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) which has its channels which promote its ideology. This was how the terrorist organization succeeded in drawing in recruits.
There British government I said to be considering new laws to crack down on online harms from extremism.

Demands and penalties
This is not the first time social media come under scrutiny from official institutions. At a counterterrorism meeting in Indonesian capital Jakarta in early November, Twitter president in Indonesia called for throwing light on the issue and discussing it.
According to him, Twitter closed 1.2 million accounts in the past two years on suspicion of the presence of links between them and terrorism. This was, however, a rare cooperation between internet firms and security state officials.
The European Commission discussed in August imposing fines on social networking sites and internet firms in case they do not remove suspicious content 60 minutes after its publication.
According to a new study on fighting social media terrorism, social media sites are used in drawing in recruits to terrorist organizations and the spread of extremist ideologies, especially by ISIS.
The study held social media sites responsible for the fear terrorist organizations spread around the world.