Social media companies face new laws to ban material fuelling knife crime in UK, home secretary says

‘We are going to legislate and how far we go depends on what they decide to do now,’ Sajid Javid says

The government has cited drill music videos as one of the drivers of stabbings (PA)

New laws are needed to make social media companies crack down on material fuelling knife crime in Britain, the home secretary has said.

Sajid Javid said that while there were laws to combat terrorist propaganda and child sex abuse images, there was a gulf for violent material.

“My message to these [social media] companies is we are going to legislate and how far we go depends on what you decide to do now,” he told BBC Newsbeat.

Mr Javid said that five technology giants, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, had been told to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to take illegal material down or stop it being uploaded.

“They are doing an incredible job today and what I want to see is them employing the same emphasis to that [knife crime-related] content too,” he added. “It can be done.”

The government’s first Serious Violence Strategy named social media among the drivers of knife and gun crime, saying it was being used to “glamorise gang or drug-selling life, taunt rivals and normalise weapons carrying”.

A former gang member previously told The Independent that young people were being “radicalised” into violence by music videos and social media.

The Metropolitan Police has been mounting an intensifying crackdown on “drill” music videos, which frequently contain graphic threats and gun signs, and have been linked to murders.

But critics say the music reflects young people’s experiences, and is being disproportionately blamed for violence amid budget cuts and falling police officer numbers.

Debate around the causes of stabbings continues to rage amid a nationwide rise in violent crime, seeing a record number of people knifed to death in the year to March.

A survey by the NSPCC found that nine in 10 parents back the regulation of social networks, to make technology firms legally responsible for protecting children.

Around 60 per cent of surveyed adults said they were failing to protect children from sexual grooming and inappropriate content like self-harm and suicide.

The NSPCC called for the creation of a new regulator with legal powers to investigate companies and enforce a set of minimum child safeguarding standards, with multimillion-pound fines for violations.

Potential requirements would include default privacy settings being raised to the highest level, children’s accounts not being publicly searchable, and limiting friend suggestions, location services and livestreaming.

NSPCC chief executive Peter Wanless said: “The support for statutory regulation of social networks is now overwhelming. It is clear that society will no longer tolerate a free for all under which tech firms allow children to operate in a precarious online world with a myriad of preventable risks. Over a decade of self-regulation has failed, and enough is enough.”

An upcoming online harms white paper will lay out the government’s proposed new laws later this year.