Web giants must do more to prevent the spread of extremism online

FOR too long the web giants have been given a free ride.

Britain let them pay little or no tax.

Worse still, they have been allowed to make merely token efforts to purge their sites of the extremism which leads to mass murder.

Post a bum or boob on social media and it’ll be pounced on. Facebook is even accused of suppressing news on conservative topics.

Yet YouTube, owned by Google, was still hosting hate videos from Anjem Choudary and his followers long after his conviction for promoting IS.

So we applaud the condemnation of them, Facebook and Twitter by the Home Affairs Select Committee for providing the “lifeblood” of Islamic terror.

It is notable that all three companies are being sued by the family of a US victim of last year’s Paris atrocity.

The web firms will say they do their best against a tsunami of extremism.

But they own the platforms and make the profits. It’s THEIR problem, whatever it takes to police.

It is time they spent far more of their vast revenues making the world safer.

Jez the start

JEREMY Corbyn has spent his career idly preaching to the converted. He loves the adulation. Yesterday we saw how he reacts to independent scrutiny — it wasn’t pretty.

Corbyn’s petulant anger towards a reporter asking him about his calamitous “packed train” stunt was telling.

Labour’s “leader” apparently never expected to be challenged on his phony antics. He had called a press conference solely to deliver a sermon on the NHS. He seemed unable to grasp that in Britain the press get to ask what they like.

Yet this is what Corbyn’s future holds if he leads Labour into an election.

He won’t just face cosy protest rallies in the “safe ­spaces” of Islington North.

Instead, he can expect round the clock scrutiny.

His backing for the IRA, for the mad socialist economics that ruined Venezuela, for unarmed nuclear submarines­ . . . all will be relentlessly examined.

Corbyn is not up to this, as voters will rapidly see. And Britain’s media will be thankful for their unfailing good sense.

Dissent, along with a free press, would be the first thing Prime Minister Corbyn would seek to crush.

Rubbish idea

EVEN at the best of times taxpayers would be justified in their outrage at £100,000 of their money being spent on “spies” to poke around in their bins.

But this is happening in Stoke-on-Trent, one of our most deprived areas, where care homes and libraries were shut to save cash but where a small rise in recycling rates is deemed vital.

This scheme’s ripe only for landfill.