Theresa May is to urge internet companies to take down extremist content being shared by terrorist groups within two hours, during a summit with the French president and the Italian prime minister.

May is meeting senior executives from Google, Facebook and Microsoft on the sidelines of the UN in New York on Wednesday alongside her French and Italian counterparts, Emmanuel Macron and Paul Gentiloni.

The meeting comes amid growing concerns that groups such as Islamic State are able to produce and distribute videos and online magazines too readily.

Home Office analysis shows that Isis shared 27,000 links to extremist content in the first five months of the 2017 and, once shared, the material remained available online for an average of 36 hours.



The government would like that reduced to two hours, and ultimately they are urging companies to develop technology to spot material early and prevent it being shared in the first place.

The prime minister will tell Wednesday’s event that Isis material is still available on the internet for “too long” after being posted. This can include links to videos glorifying terrorism and material encouraging converts to commit acts of the kind that were carried out in Westminster and Barcelona earlier this year, involving vehicles or knives.

May will say: “Terrorist groups are aware that links to their propaganda are being removed more quickly, and are placing a greater emphasis on disseminating content at speed in order to stay ahead.

“Industry needs to go further and faster in automating the detection and removal of terrorist content online, and developing technological solutions that prevent it being uploaded in the first place.”

The issue is of particular concern after last week’s attack on a London Underground train at Parsons Green, and follows a British thinktank report on Tuesday, which found that online jihadist propaganda attracts more clicks in Britain than anywhere else in Europe.

Macron and May discussed the issue when the pair met in June, and suggested they would consider more robust action, including imposing fines on companies that fail to act. They are demanding evidence of progress by the time of a meeting of G7 interior ministers in Rome on 20 October.

The government is targeting “disseminators” – platforms such as Twitter, through which the content is shared; “content stores” such as the filesharing site YouTube; and “aggregators” such as WordPress, where extremist content is stored.

They would like the companies to cut back the window of time during which the material can be actively shared, and to develop technologies to recognise extremist content and prevent it being uploaded in the first place.

Extremist material is shared very rapidly when it is first published in what experts call a “starburst” effect: more than two-thirds of shares take place within the first two hours, so reducing the amount of time the material is visible can drastically squeeze the number of users who see it – and the government believes internet companies could do more.

“They have been doing something, but just not enough,” said a government source. “In particular, the government believes they could do more to develop new technology that would identify extremist content before it can be shared.

“These companies have some of the best brains in the world. They should really be focusing that on what matters, which is stopping the spread of terrorism and violence.”

The source added that once an internet user has shown interest in extremist content, the web giants’ algorithms keep pushing similar material towards them online. “We want them to break the echo chambers,” he said.

Google and YouTube have said they are increasing their use of technology to help automatically identify videos. Twitter suspended 299,649 accounts between 1 January and 30 June this year, with 75% of accounts suspended before their first tweet.

Facebook has also stated publicly that it is looking at developing artificial intelligence to automate the identification of terrorist material.

Terrorism will be one of the main themes of May’s speech to the UN general assembly on Wednesday lunchtime.



Theresa May is greeted by UN secretary general António Guterres before a meeting at UN headquarters in New York. Photograph: Craig Ruttle/EPA

She will reflect on the attacks on the UK this year, and call for more to be done to root out the ideology that drives them. “As prime minister, I have visited too many hospitals and seen too many innocent people murdered in my country,” she will say.

“When I think of the hundreds of thousands of victims of terrorism in countries across the world, I think of their friends, their families, their communities, devastated by this evil. And I say enough is enough.”

She will add, “ultimately it is not just the terrorists themselves who we need to defeat. It is the extremist ideologies that fuel them. It is the ideologies that preach hatred, sow division and undermine our common humanity. We must be far more robust in identifying these ideologies and defeating them – across all parts of our societies.”



Internet executives attending the web summit will include Kent Walker, who is general counsel at Google; Monika Bickert, head of global policy at Facebook; and David Heiner, deputy general counsel at Microsoft.

The New York event will also be attended by advertisers including WPP, because the UK government hopes they will be one source of pressure on the companies to take a tough approach.

Smaller firms are also being supported to beef up their technology to detect extremist content more successfully; and the government hopes to encourage the spread of “counter-narratives” from civil society groups offering an alternative perspective.

Meanwhile, YouTube has been strongly criticised for failing to take down more than 120 Islamist and far-right extremist videos, including material promoting Adolf Hitler and the Taliban, despite complaints.

The disclosure comes as the result of a three-month study commissioned by Yvette Cooper, the chair of the Commons home affairs committee, who said it was “simply unacceptable” that 61 far-right extremist and 60 Islamist extremist videos remained online weeks after being reported.

“It is simply unacceptable that YouTube are taking so long to remove material that contains images and content that glorify extremist violence,” Cooper said. “Whether that’s Islamist extremism or far-right extremism, the reality is that this material is far too far easy to access.”

YouTube insisted, however, that it was stepping up efforts to tackle online extremism and said the majority of such videos removed in the past month had been taken down before any complaint had been received.

The social media giant, Twitter, also disclosed that it had suspended almost 300,000 accounts in the first six months of 2017 for violations relating to the promotion of terrorism.