Yahoo – AFP,
Ella IDE, October 20, 2017
Ischia (Italy) (AFP) - G7 countries and tech giants including Google, Facebook and Twitter on Friday agreed to work together to block the dissemination of Islamist extremism over the internet.
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| The G7 interior ministers are meeting at a seafront hotel on the island of Ischia off the coast of Naples. (AFP Photo/Andreas SOLARO) |
Ischia (Italy) (AFP) - G7 countries and tech giants including Google, Facebook and Twitter on Friday agreed to work together to block the dissemination of Islamist extremism over the internet.
"These
are the first steps towards a great alliance in the name of freedom,"
Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti said after a two-day meeting with his
Group of Seven counterparts, stressing the role of the internet in extremist
"recruitment, training and radicalisation."
French
Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said the goal was to ensure pro-jihadist
content "is taken down within two hours of it going online".
"Our
enemies are moving at the speed of a tweet and we need to counter them just as
quickly," acting US Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke said.
While
acknowledging progress had been made, Britain's Home Secretary Amber Rudd
insisted "companies need to go further and faster to not only take down extremist
content but also stop it being uploaded in the first place".
Senior
executives from the internet giants and Microsoft attended the ministerial
session devoted to the issue but did not offer any explanation on how they
might go about clamping down on web extremists.
Jihadists
fleeing Syria
The meeting
on the Italian island of Ischia off Naples also focused on ways to tackle one
of the West's biggest security threats: jihadist fighters fleeing Syria. The
European Union has promised to help close a migration route considered a
potential back door for terrorists.
Tens of
thousands of citizens from Western countries travelled to Syria and Iraq to
fight for the Islamic State group between 2014 and 2016. Some then returned
home and staged attacks that claimed dozens of lives.
Minniti
warned last week that fighters planning revenge attacks following the recent
collapse of the IS stronghold in Raqa could hitch lifts back to Europe on
migrant boats from Libya.
The US and
Italy signed an agreement on the sidelines of the G7 meeting to share their fingerprint
databases in a bid to root out potential extremists posing as asylum seekers.
The group
also said international police agency Interpol -- which currently holds details
of nearly 40,000 foreign fighters -- would play a bigger role in information sharing.
Interpol's
secretary general Juergen Stock said the agency's global databases could
"act as an 'early warning system' against terrorists and crime threats and
help close potential loopholes for terrorists".
'De-radicalisation'
Earlier, EU
President Donald Tusk promised the bloc would fork out more funds to help shut
down the perilous crossing from Libya to Italy -- a popular path for migrants
who hope to journey on to Europe.
The EU
would offer "stronger support for Italy's work with the Libyan
authorities", and there was "a real chance of closing the central
Mediterranean route", he said.
Italy has
played a major role in training Libya's coastguard to stop human trafficking in
its territorial waters, as well as making controversial deals with Libyan
militias to stop migrants from setting off.
Minniti
said the G7 ministers had discussed how to go about "de-radicalising"
citizens returning from the IS frontline, to prevent them becoming security
risks in jails.
UK's hard
approach
The Group
of Seven --- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the US -- said
it had also called on the web giants to work with their smaller partners to
bolster the anti-extremism shield.
Rudd said
the UK government would do its part by changing the law so that those accessing
and viewing extremist material on the web could face up to 15 years behind
bars.
But Julian
Richards, security specialist at BUCSIS (Buckingham University Centre for
Security and Intelligence Studies), said the rest of the G7 was unlikely to get
behind her on that front.
"The
UK's fairly hard approach of introducing legislative measures to try to force
companies to cooperate... and suggestions that people radicalising online
should have longer sentences, are often considered rather unpalatable and too
politically sensitive in many other advanced countries," he told AFP.
#G7InteriorMinisters, tech giants agree on plan to block jihadist content online https://t.co/OoHdWTvKQk by @ellaafp pic.twitter.com/fUk0SJD4Xc— AFP news agency (@AFP) October 20, 2017
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