Twitter and Facebook have been accused by a parliamentary committee of failing to do enough to protect female MPs and other public figures from violent or misogynistic abuse.

Representatives of the two social media giants appeared before the joint human rights committee on Wednesday, where one member – Joanna Cherry, an SNP MP – showed examples of the type of abuse that female MPs faced.

Cherry showed graphic videos sent to MPs from an account dubbed Sonic Fox, depicting violence towards women in the form of a computer game, and explained that it was not initially taken down by Twitter despite a complaint.

Cherry asked if the company would accept that it had made mistakes in policing that constituted a “failure to protect women”, and said the company only seemed to act when high-profile figures complained.

“There seems to be a pattern of Twitter initially ruling that extremely offensive and violent tweets directed at women in public life are acceptable, and that Twitter only reviews their decision when they are pressed by other figures in public life,” she said.

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The human rights committee has been taking evidence of abuse in confidence from some MPs to support its work. Its chair, Labour MP Harriet Harman, said the abuse was out of control. “We’ve heard about … threats to rape, threats to kill, threats to bomb, threats to kill your children, ‘We know where you live’, messages with pictures of guns, pictures of nooses,” the former minister told the committee.

Kay Minshall, Twitter’s head of UK government, public policy and philanthropy, said she was “horrified” by the stories of abuse she had encountered, and acknowledged that the company needed to improve its response. “There is clearly a number of steps that we want to take, we need to take – but we are in a different place to where we were even this time last year.”

Minshall said Twitter now cooperated closely with parliamentary police authorities over abuse, and that 38% of the cases it had dealt with were identified by employees, when previously complaints had to have been made by users.

It had also identified more than 100,000 “ban evaders” – people who had rejoined Twitter despite being banned for abuse – in the first three months of the year.

Rebecca Stimson, Facebook‘s UK head of public policy, said the company had improved its handling of high-profile abuse cases by introducing “a dedicated reporting channel for public figures in the UK”.