Social media titans admit to losing the online battle on filth even as they delete millions of posts and videos
Facebook deleted three million posts under hate speech rules within 12 weeks while 8million videos have been removed from YouTube between April and June
SOCIAL media titans admitted to MPs yesterday they were struggling to stem the tide of vile and illegal content online after deleting more than 3 million hate speech posts in only 12 weeks.
A senior Facebook official told a Commons committee they had removed three million posts under hate speech rules between January and March.
That was 500,000 more than the previous three months.
Questioned by the Commons Science and Technology committee, Karim Palant said the social network had also taken down 20 million images of adult nudity in the first three months of the year.
Twitter’s Sinead McSweeney also told the committee they had deleted one million accounts posting terrorist content since 2015.
That included 275,000 in the last six months of 2017.
Google UK’s head of child safety, Claire Lilley, said almost 8mn videos had been removed from YouTube between April and June.
That figure was up from 5m six months previously.
She said the internet giant receives “hundreds of thousands of reports of inappropriate content every day”.
She told MPs: “In quarter two we removed 7.7 million videos from YouTube. We will have 10,000 moderators by the end of the year.”
But Ms McSwinney insisted it was up to parents to do more to keep youngsters away from abusive content - despite admitting the site hadn’t done enough to tackle it.
She said: “We put out hands up and said we hadn’t done enough in the early days.
“We will play our part by putting age limits and big signs saying this is not appropriate, but if people are allowing their children to sit in bedrooms with devices with nobody knocking door occasionally to say what’s going on...”
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All three firms said they would not object to an independent regulator being appointed to monitor their platforms.
It came as Facebook announced new transparency tools for the UK around political advertising to tackle the scourge of fake news.
Organisations who want to post political adverts on the site are now required to verify their identity and location first.
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