A senior British Labour MP has criticised Twitter’s vice president Sinead McSweeney for failing to remove vile antisemitic and abusive tweets.
The social media giant was condemned at a UK Home Affairs Committee hearing on Tuesday for repeatedly failing to delete offensive tweets flagged by Westminster.
Yvette Cooper, the Labour MP who chairs the watchdog, told McSweeney it was “hard to believe” Twitter was doing enough to tackle hate crime when posts reported months ago remained viewable on the platform.
Cooper referenced a string of previously-reported messages that were still on the social network, such as one tweet branding someone a “filthy Jew bitch.”
She told McSweeney: “I’m kind of wondering what we have to do. We sat in this committee in a public hearing and raised a clearly vile antisemitic tweet with your organisation.”
“It was discussed and it is still there, and everybody accepted, you’ve accepted, your predecessor accepted, that it was unacceptable. But it is still there on the platform.”
“What is it that we have got to do to get you to take it down?”
Asked why the bigoted tweets remained on her platform, McSweeney said: “I don’t know the answer to that question. I will come back to you with an answer as to why they are still on the platform.”
But she added that Twitter will never be able to guarantee a platform free of abusive messages.
“You can clean a street every morning,” she said, “you can’t guarantee it’s still going to be clean at 10 am.”
The MP’s comments came as MPs grilled social media giants over their alleged failure to tackle online abuse on their platforms.
Senior figures from Twitter, Facebook and Google all faced the committee, which is investigating how they deal with abusive content.
Twitter suspended a number of accounts related to far-right group Britain First on Tuesday, including deputy leader Jayda Fransen, who made headlines recently when US President Donald Trump retweeted one of her posts about Muslims.
Others facing the watchdog’s questions were Facebook’s director of public policy Simon Milner, and Dr Nicklas Berild Lundblad, Google’s vice president for public policy.
