Algorithms push viewers to extremes, senior MP says at launch of report on far right

Social media companies have been heavily criticised at the launch of a major report on the far right, with YouTube being labelled an “organ of radicalisation”.

The State of Hate 2020 report, by Hope Not Hate, also found the Conservative party had suspended more than 20 officials and activists, including six sitting councillors, who had posted Islamophobic comments on social media.

Yvette Cooper, the Labour chair of the Commons home affairs select committee, said on Monday that when she and others had set up an account to search for one of the far-right groups named in the report, YouTube had automatically suggested that viewers might want to watch neo-Nazi videos.

“Look up one thing out of curiosity and YouTube is ever willing to offer far, far more, often getting far more extreme and pushing further out to the extremes, because that is how YouTube works,” she said. “They have become an organ of radicalisation instead of taking responsibility, for that is the way their algorithms work.”

Cooper said a sense of decency which had always been a bulwark against the rise of the far right was on the decline. And she criticised both her own party for its “complicity” at a time when antisemitism was on the rise across Europe and the Conservatives for being “blind” to the Islamophobia in its own ranks.

Hope Not Hate’s report detailed the actions of Tories who had been suspended over Islamophobic social media posts.

In one screenshot taken by the campaign group, a Facebook account appearing to be that of the Nottinghamshire county councillor Steve Vickers published a post after the 2016 terrorist attack in Nice in which he said the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, “and his brethren” were “part of the problem”.

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In response to the then prime minister, Theresa May, wishing Muslims a happy Eid on Facebook, screenshots show an account apparently belonging to the Harworth and Bircotes town councillor Sonia Armstrong leaving a long comment, much of it in capital letters.

“She should put a wig on, disguise herself and have a walk around these cities alone especially at night, and then tell us how much they give to GB and how well they have integrated,” she wrote.

She cited the “raping and killing of our people” as making citizens “too frightened to go out alone any more”, and said that “no one knows how much they enforce sharia law” because police turn “a blind eye to everything they do all because of political correctness”.

The report also accuses the Winchester city councillor Judith Clementson of using an anonymous Twitter account to post conspiracy theories about a “dangerous Muslim agenda for world domination”.

The Hounslow borough councillor Ranjit Pendhar Singh Gill allegedly “celebrated” Donald Trump’s election and his proposals to exclude Muslims from the US. And in another post he reportedly wrote about “75 million Muslim Turks” who planned to “infiltrate the UK”.

The dossier also indicts a number of ex-councillors. It states that Gail Hall, a Gwynedd county councillor from 2008-12, shared multiple anti-Muslim posts from far-right Facebook pages, calling Muslims “savages”. The report says she had also “liked” comments referring to Muslims as “scumbags” and encouraging them to “sling their hooks back to their ancestral homelands”.

Chris Meakin, the leader of the Conservative opposition in Southwark council during the 1970s and 80s, and who stood for election in Southwark council in 2002, also features in the report. It includes a screenshot of a post from an account matching his name, saying that Muslims did not deserve human rights “because of their animal-like behaviour”, and that it was “time to deploy the machine guns” against these “invaders”.

“Such an enemy must be eliminated,” it ends.

Hope Not Hate called on Conservative Campaign Headquarters “to take immediate action against these individuals”, and said it “will continue to demand that they take proper steps to tackle the Islamophobia crisis that has gripped the party at every level”.

It also said that allegations made against the Conservative party “painted a picture of a party that had a significant problem with anti-Muslim sentiment at local level”.

A party spokesperson told the Guardian: “All those found to be party members have been suspended immediately, pending investigation. The swift action we take on not just anti-Muslim discrimination but discrimination of any kind is testament to the seriousness with which we take such issues.”

A spokesperson for the Muslim Council of Britain blamed the Conservative party leadership for failing to tackle the issue and called for a formal inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

“The Conservative party has an institutional problem of Islamophobia, which it seems unwilling to acknowledge, let alone tackle,” the spokesperson said.

“This latest evidence only adds to the wealth of examples we have seen in recent months, most of which have been met with indifference and inaction. Unlike those cases, it is welcome that action has been taken in these cases, but the suspensions must be properly followed through with appropriate sanctions where necessary, and transparency over who is readmitted into the party and why. Given the history of the party, we cannot be hopeful.

Responding to Cooper’s concerns, a YouTube spokesperson said that it had begun reducing recommendations of what it described as “borderline” content and videos that could misinform users in harmful ways.

“Thanks to this change, the number of views this type of content gets from recommendations has dropped by over 70% in the US and has been rolled out in the UK as well. While we’ve made good progress, our work here is not done and we will continue making more improvements this year.”