Posted June 05, 2017 13:43:20

Photo: Theresa May wants governments to cooperate to "prevent the spread of extremism and terrorism planning". (Reuters: Hannah McKay)

Cyber security experts have criticised British Prime Minister Theresa May's push for new international regulations on the internet aimed at preventing them being "safe spaces" for extremist ideology.

In the wake of the London attacks, Mrs May said big internet companies were partly responsible for providing extreme ideology the space to develop.

"We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements that regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremism and terrorism planning," Mrs May said.

"We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed. Yet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services, provide."

Nigel Phair, the director of the Centre for Internet Safety at the University of Canberra, said efforts to drive terrorism offline had the potential to backfire.

"If you start taking them off these platforms, all of a sudden you don't know who they are and what they're doing, and it'll drive them to more underground areas," he said.

He warned policies that drive extremists "underground" could hamper the efforts of authorities to catch them.

"When they're using mainstream social media, you can monitor them and see what they do, where they are — there's a lot of metadata around this with geolocation and other services that they are using," he said.

"You can get a really good picture of who that person is and monitor their activity."

Mrs May has previously asked multinational internet companies to take more responsibility for their content, last month promising an industry-wide levy so companies would foot the bill for policing the internet, if she wins the upcoming election.

Mr Phair said that was a reasonable approach.

"There's a responsibility for these organisations, who profiteer handsomely from us using them, to use the rules of the road," he said.

Facebook, Twitter 'need to work even harder'

Facebook's director of policy Simon Milner in a statement said he wanted to social media platform to be "a hostile environment for terrorists".

"Using a combination of technology and human review, we work aggressively to remove terrorist content from our platform as soon as we become aware of it," he said.

Twitter also said it was working to tackle the spread of militant propaganda on its service, with Twitter's UK head of public policy Nick Pickles saying "terrorist content has no place on Twitter".

In the second half of 2016, Twitter claims it suspended nearly 400,000 accounts for inappropriate content.

"I don't dispute they work hard, but I think they need to work even harder again," Mr Phair said.

Topics: terrorism, internet-culture, internet-technology, social-media, information-and-communication, government-and-politics, united-kingdom