Social media firms failing to pass on information

Sir Mark Rowley has criticised social media companies who failed to alert ­police to any suspicious terrorist activity on their platforms for four years. The former head of counter terrorism for the Metropolitan Police said that their failure to pass on information had been ‘wholly irresponsible’ and put lives at risk as he called for financial penalties to be issued. Writing for The Daily Telegraph, Rowley said that he saw ‘zero proactive reports of suspicious behaviour’ in the four years in which he led police counter terrorism efforts, saying that such ‘irresponsible’ behaviour ‘makes the work of police and MI5 more difficult and endangers the public’s safety’. He went on to say that social media companies had been ‘too late and too slow’ in reacting to the rise of ISIS, slamming their ‘brutal commercial focus aimed at cashing in on our attention’. Rowley here cited their use of monetising algorithms that drove social media users to the most extreme ­material as an example. He said: “We need to look ­seriously at regulation that holds companies to UK standards for content, requires ­suspicious activity reporting and ­perhaps enables an ethical code of practice for algorithms.”