Tech giants including Google, Facebook and Twitter are to come under pressure in Italy this week to go further and faster in helping G7 powers tackle the ever-greater threat of extremists online.
A two-day meeting of the G7 ministers of the interior, which began on the Italian island of Ischia yesterday, came just days after US-backed forces took full control of Raqqa in Syria, which had become a byword for atrocities carried out by the Islamic State group.
Despite the breakthrough in the battle against the militants, the head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service on Wednesday said that the kingdom was facing its most severe terrorist threat ever, particularly due to the spread of jihadist material online.
MI5 Director-General Andrew Parker said attacks could now accelerate rapidly from inception to action, and “this pace, together with the way extremists can exploit safe spaces online, can make threats harder to detect.”
In a first for a G7 meeting, representatives from Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter are to take part in the talks between the seven ministers from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the US.
“The Internet plays a decisive role in radicalization. Over 80 percent of conversations and radicalization happen online,” said Italian Minister of the Interior Marco Minniti, who is hosting the summit on the volcanic island off Naples.
In June, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube announced the launch of an anti-terror partnership, the “Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism,” aimed at thwarting the spread of extremist content online.
Facebook has launched campaigns in Belgium, Britain, France and Germany to develop “best practices,” and last month, Twitter touted victories in the battle against tweets promoting extremist violence, saying it has been vanquishing those kinds of accounts before governments even ask.
However, last month top Western counterterrorism chiefs said they need more support from social media companies to detect potential threats, particularly with jihadist attacks increasingly being carried out by home-grown “lone wolves.”
Tough privacy laws and protections enjoyed by the largely US-based Web giants are impeding authorities, they said.
Some firms are using software aimed at helping them quickly find and eliminate extremist content, developed by Dartmouth College computer science professor Hany Farid, a senior adviser to the US Counter Extremism Project, but Farid said it was unclear how broadly it was being deployed and urged the G7 to “give serious consideration to legislative relief” if the tech giants fail to “wake up and respond more aggressively” to abuses of their systems.
While some warn terror online would be difficult to conquer, with extremists simply moving onto the “Dark Web,” Italian expert Marco Lombardi said jihadists would not readily give up the mass-audience potential of social media.
Opportunities for “conversion, propaganda and dissemination” lie “on sites capable of influencing thousands of youngsters with a few ‘likes,’” Lombardi said.
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