Twitter,the social media site popular with the likes of raconteur Stephen Fry and columnist Charlie Brooker, will be asked to identify people who are “vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism” as part of the government’s redrawn counter-terrorism programme to be detailed on Tuesday.
Stephen Fry
The Prevent programme was developed to combat home-grown terrorism after the 7 July bombings in 2005.The final draft is believed to propose to “expand Prevent programmes to social media sites to draw on the expertise of internet experts”
Utilising a version of Twitter’s revolutionary, popular and incredibly accurate “Who To Follow” feature, will attempt to pinpoint those who use Twitter, known as “Twitterers”, who may, in the words of Theresa May, “be close to attempting to use the internet to spread fear and terror”.
“The Twitter ‘who to follow’ recommendations are easily the most beneficial way to use Twitter to find like minded people and by tweaking the algorithms slightly we can easily detect those who may, at some stage in the future, may intend to do harm to this country, or indeed other countries” a Twitter social media guru claimed today.
One “key message” of the document is that it is not a programme to spy on Muslim communities, but doctors will be asked to identify people who may be “vulnerable” to recruitment by terrorist groups, especially by use of popular Twitter wordplay games, using what is known as “hashtag games”
David Cameron has pushed through the change despite opposition from Nick Clegg and Charles Farr, the head of the office of security and counter-terrorism, arguing that such engagement is like “turning to a rightwing fascist party to fight a violent white supremacist movement or using Myspace to crush Bebo”.
“If we had these measures in place a few years ago then perhaps we could have arrested Paul Chambers before he blew up an airport” said Cameron in a press conference on Tuesday. When it was pointed out to the prime minister that Chambers had not actually blown up an airport, or indeed even threatened to do so in anything other than a light hearted way, the prime minister dismissed this as “mere details” which “showed the policy worked” even before it’s inception. When pressed on this the press conference was adjourned.
When the home secretary’s office was asked about using a similar policy on Facebook the official response was “We don’t do Facebook, we find their privacy policies to be intrusive.”
(Inspired by this. http://bit.ly/iU2s5r)
