Terrorists operate freely and with impunity on social media, while conservatives are banned. Conservatives are systematically blocked and suspended merely for posting opposing views to this oppression and totalitarianism while left-wing hate and violence proliferates. This will not end well. So totalitarian are the social media giants in suppressing our First Amendment rights and freedoms, it will take the government to restore our freedoms. I hope that antitrust legislation will be undertaken against all of them: Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Adsense, and the rest.

“Social Media: Recruiting grounds for terrorists,” by Simon Bouda, 9 News, December 7, 2018 (thanks to Greg):

Social media – furtive ground for prospective terrorists.

That’s the warning from an international counter-terrorism expert.

“We are facing a challenging time with a much more connected world and much more volatility,” former Scotland Yard police chief Mark Rowley warns.

“All the analysis, all the experts would say that this high level of threat is certainly going to continue for the next couple of years.”

As Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations in London’s Metropolitan Police Service, Sir Mark Rowley oversaw investigating some of Britain’s most horrific terrorist attacks.

He’s in Australia providing insight into tackling extremism, and he’s taking aim at social media co-operation.

“So, there is a million and one ways the tech world is affecting us all, isn’t there?” he asks.

“And a lot of them are fantastic and positive.

“But the negative edge to it needs more attention and I think we need these companies to get more proactive at helping us fix it.”

One of the biggest problems is the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter – fertile recruiting ground for terror networks such as ISIS.

“What we were used to wrestling with were terror networks, secret cells, secret organisations working very, very privately behind closed doors,” Sir Mark says.

“What ISIS did was to completely flip that around and using social media, using the internet -they basically became open source.”

The internet nurtured terrorist is now the norm.

“This changing model has completely opened up to anybody of being a terrorist, so that an angry 17-year-old now can get all the instructions on line, learn a warped view of Islam to, sort of, sign up to… get terrorist instructions – learn how to conduct attacks, get suggestions on where to attack and be a terrorist in a matter of weeks,” Sir Mark added.

And that is a magnet for what’s known as lone actors, or lone wolves.

“It’s aggravated by the ability of people to work across the world, encrypted communications, the context makes that even more possible,” he says.

But the problem is while tech companies are quick to pull down offensive or terrorist material they are not passing on that intelligence claiming privacy issues.

“Certainly, the UK’s experience was they never gave any tip offs,” Sir Mark says.

“So, you may be publishing on some platform – on a regular basis – gruesome terrorist material and they keep taking down your accounts.

“At the moment they don’t tell the police about that… there is no justification for not doing that whatsoever. I think that is unacceptable.

“If a social media company sees out-and-out terrorist material, which they’re cleaning off, they should be telling law enforcement or intelligence agencies everything possible about the account holder – why wouldn’t they?”

Just yesterday the Federal Government passed laws making it easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to access encrypted data….