Friday's Daily Mail: "Google, the terrorists' friend..." #bbcpapers #tomorrowspaperstoday (via @hendopolis)
11:05 PM - 23 Mar 2017 Reply Retweet Favorite
Google and Facebook have been under mounting pressure in recent weeks after an investigation by The Times found advertisements for big companies were appearing on Google's YouTube video platform alongside clips promoting hateful, racist or otherwise offensive views.
Numerous large companies have suspended advertising campaigns with Google as the publicity intensified. In Westminster, politicians also piled on the pressure. This month, executives for Google, Facebook and Twitter were grilled by the UK parliament's home affairs committee for several hours.
Yvette Cooper, the chairwoman, said Google's attempts to police its own standards were a "joke" after the company defended its decision not to take down an anti-Semitic video fronted by the American white nationalist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
The Commons' Culture, Media and Sport committee, chaired by the Conservative MP Damian Collins, is also looking closely at Google and Facebook.
While the newspapers' reporting has put Google and Facebook under the microscope publicly, lobbyists for Fleet Street have, behind the scenes, been urging the government and regulators to take action to curb the companies' increasing dominance over the news business.
With consumers increasingly getting their news from social media on mobile devices, editors have been replaced by algorithms. Advertising revenues that underpinned traditional publishing businesses are being gobbled up instead by the technology companies.
This month, the News Media Association, the lobbying group for British newspapers, urged the government to tilt the balance back toward the newspaper publishers.
The internet giants have come under fire after terror incidents in the UK before.
In its 2014 report into the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby, parliament's intelligence and security committee accused internet firms of unintentionally "providing a safe haven for terrorists", prompting then prime minister David Cameron to accuse the tech giants of allowing extremists to plot "murder and mayhem".
The criticism came after it emerged that one of the killers, Michael Adebowale, indicated his murderous intent in a post on Facebook but it was not brought to the attention of law enforcement authorities.
The security services, the report found, had not applied for warrants to monitor the two individuals, despite the fact that they had featured in a total of seven MI5 investigations. But while the intelligence agencies escaped with only light criticism for the "errors", the committee said it was "unacceptable" that Facebook did not seem to think it had an obligation to weed out and report to the authorities security threats.
As home secretary, May pushed for the intelligence and law enforcement authorities to have greater powers to pursue suspected terrorists online.
In her speech to the Conservative party's annual conference in September, her first as prime minister, May appeared to put the social media giants on notice, citing "a household name that refuses to work with the authorities even to fight terrorism" as the sort of corporate behaviour she would not tolerate.