London-A British parliamentary panel has slammed social media networks mainly Facebook and Twitter for not taking extra measures to stop extremists from benefiting from their services.
Keith Vaz, chairman of the parliamentary committee, wrote in a report issued on Thursday that popular social-media platforms had become “the vehicle of choice in spreading propaganda and the recruiting platforms for terrorism.”
“Huge corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter, with their billion dollar incomes, are consciously failing to tackle this threat and passing the buck by hiding behind their supranational status, despite knowing that their sites are being used by the instigators of terror,” said Vaz.
The report said it was “alarming” that teams of only a few hundred employees at the internet firms were monitoring billions of accounts.
Twitter said last week it had suspended 235,000 accounts during the last six months believed to have links to militant groups, double the number it suspended from the middle of last year to February.
The report called on the companies to work more closely with the counter terrorism police.
According to experts, it is not enough for internet giants to close accounts in the fight against extremists. They believe that this strategy is not successful because it is very easy to open new accounts.
This policy would also push users into more encrypted social media networks.