Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to ensure that the police have adequate provisions to counter terrorist content online.

The Government has been clear that there can be no safe spaces for terrorists to promote and share their extreme views online.

The Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) identifies, assesses and refers online content that is in breach of UK terrorism legislation to technology companies for removal in accordance with their terms of service. To date, in excess of 310,000 individual pieces of terrorist content referred by CTIRU have been removed by companies.

Police powers need to keep pace with technological developments and the changing way terrorists use the internet. As part of this we amended the law through the Counter Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019 to update the offence of obtaining information “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism” to include viewing or streaming content online.

It is important that we ensure counter-terrorism policing has the resources needed to deal with the threat we face. That is why we increased the budget for counter-terrorism policing in 2020-21 by £90m this year compared with last, taking CT police funding to over £900m for the first time