As is so often the case, The Daily Mail started it. After the Parsons Green attack last week, the newspaper wasted no time in allocating blame. A day after the tube bombing, the Mail’s front page headline read: WEB GIANTS WITH BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS.
This isn’t a new line of argument for the paper, which labelled Google “the terrorist’s friend” after the Westminster attack in March. As I wrote in the magazine back in April, the government (with the aid of particular papers) consistently uses the threat of terrorism to challenge tech giants and thus justify extreme invasions of our online privacy. This year, Amber Rudd condemned WhatsApp’s privacy-protecting encryption practices, the Snoopers’ Charter passed with little fanfare, the Electoral Commission suggested social media trolls should be banned from voting, and now – just today – Theresa May has threatened web giants with fines if they fail to remove extremist content from their site in just two hours.
Content from our partners
