Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are "consciously failing" to fight extremism and the promotion of violent terror on their sites, MPs said on Thursday.
The influential home affairs select committee's inquiry into radicalisation said "cyber-war... is one the greatest threats" the UK faces. But it found online networks are failing to play their part in fighting the danger.
In their report the MPs warned these sites were the "Wild West of the internet" as they were "the vehicle of choice in spreading propaganda and the recruiting platforms for terrorism".
They called on the companies to accept a "greater sense of responsibility and ownership for the impact that extremist material on their sites is having".
The report said it was "alarming" these companies only employed a few hundred staff to monitor billions of account. It singled out Twitter for particular criticism because it does not proactively report extremist content to law enforcement agencies.
Terror-related incidents shot up by 35 per cent from 2010 to 2015 and the Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) removed 120,000 online pieces of terror-related content between 2010 and 2016. But the chair of the committee Rt Hon Keith Vaz said corporations such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube know their sites are used to spread terror but are deliberately "passing the buck by hiding behind their supranational legal status".
He said: "We are engaged in a war for hearts and minds in the fight against terrorism. The modern front line is the internet. Its forums, message boards and social media platforms are the lifeblood of Daesh [ISIS] and other terrorist groups for their recruitment and financing and the spread of ideology."
Vaz said companies' failure to tackle this had left parts of the internet "ungoverned, unregulated and lawless".
The report called for the CTIRU to be upgraded to a "high-tech, state-of-the-art, round-the-clock, central Operational Hub" to identify and remove dangerous content quickly. MPs said tech-companies should have their staff work within the police unit to help crackdown on extremist content.
MPs also criticised the government's counter-extremism Prevent strategy and called for it to be renamed 'Engage' "to remove its already toxic associations in the Muslim community". The report called for a fuller engagement with Muslims and said the government must be more transparent.
The Muslim Council of Britain welcomed these recommendations and said Prevent's focus should be building partnerships between community groups and the state.
"For too long, successive governments have failed to work in partnership with a wide cross section of the Muslim community, as equal stakeholders in the fight against terrorism," it said.
