The UK Home Office has announced the launch of an international Countering Violent Extremism Hub. As reported in The Times, this will gather together extremism experts from the Five Eyes security partnership of the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Britain. They will scour social media looking for violent and extremist content – and thereby identify ‘ultra-violent extremists’. The five nations will then use their collective weight to pressure tech companies into removing said content, which may not be illegal but could breach their terms of service.

It seems that the British government is doubling down on its strategy to blame social media for everything. The idea that clamping down on social media will address violent extremism is worse than a sticking plaster. It’s an outright attack on free speech that will only serve to treat symptoms rather than the cause. Making tweets disappear will not make extremism disappear – it just hides it from view. This Home Office initiative is nothing more than a three-monkeys conjuring trick. If we ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’, then there is no evil. There you go. Job’s a good ’un. Violent extremism driven by ideology is done and dusted, a thing of the past.

Advocates of the Five Eyes hub claim it will help states identify and catch ‘ultra-violent extremists’ in an effort to stop a repeat of the Southport attack in the summer of 2024, when Axel Rudakubana killed three young girls and injured eight more and two adults at a dance class. But Rudakubana himself had already been identified as a possible threat by the authorities. He was referred three times to the government’s counter-extremism scheme, Prevent, and each time no further action was taken. Prevent didn’t prevent the Southport attack. And yet here we have a new body trying to convince us that the problem is social media, not chronic state failure.

The focus on tech as a cause of violent extremism simply doesn’t compute. Terrorism long predates the internet, after all. For instance, the Munich massacre – in which pro-Palestine militants killed 11 Israeli athletes and a West German police officer during the Munich Olympics – took place in 1972. That was certainly an example of violent extremism, but it happened quite a bit before the internet.

Yet the Home Office, announcing the creation of the hub, insists that the internet is the problem. It talks of the ‘radicalising effects of new technologies, including AI’, and of individuals being ‘radicalised online through exposure to harmful content, extremist propaganda and violent networks’.

So it’s the internet and AI that are fuelling violent extremism, not assorted violent, extremist ideologies? ‘Five Eyes partners’, the Home Office claims, ‘will work closely with technology companies, industry partners and governments to act faster against harmful content and strengthen protections for users… This will make it harder for extremists to exploit online platforms for recruitment, radicalisation and the spread of violent material.’

That’s the nub of it. Rather than tackling extremists by actually apprehending them, the Home Office wants tech companies to police extremist content instead. The Home Office statement adds: ‘To tackle the increasing online radicalisation of young people, ministers have also agreed a new diversion programme so authorities can intervene faster when people show signs of radicalisation or develop a fixation with violence.’

This is indeed ‘a new diversion programme’. It’s a plan to kick the can down the road, avoid accountability and conceal and deflect from the state’s own failings. The new scheme is even to be called the Online-Offline Diversions programme. Home secretary Shabana Mahmood continued the tech-blaming narrative: ‘As we have seen with so many tragic incidents across the world, the threat posed by violent extremists is real and continues to evolve, often fuelled by new technologies.’

The one threat not addressed is the actual extremists doing the radicalising. As the then Tory government’s 2023 Counter-Terrorism Strategy states: ‘In the UK, the primary domestic terrorist threat comes from Islamist terrorism, which accounts for approximately 67 per cent of attacks since 2018, about three-quarters of MI5’s caseload and 64 per cent of those in custody for terrorism-connected offences.’ Yet instead of focussing on tackling actual Islamist extremists, Labour wants to scale up the ‘diversion programme’ by blaming social media, AI and the tech companies.

This blame-it-on-tech diversion tactic was deployed recently in response to the A66 crash near Middlesbrough, in which a car being driven the wrong way down the dual carriageway smashed into a police car, killing two police officers and five young men. Almost immediately the Labour government blamed social-media videos of dangerous driving for fuelling reckless behaviour among youngsters. Prime minister Andy Burnham said that sharing videos that glorify dangerous driving is ‘truly reprehensible’.

Yet the facts don’t back up the narrative. The number of deaths caused by dangerous driving has actually decreased by 58 per cent since the advent of YouTube in 2005. And more pointedly, the police said of the A66 crash itself that there is ‘no evidence to indicate that filming of the activities… has taken place for the purposes of TikTok’.

But rather than confront the criminality – four of the five young men had pleaded guilty to a combined 37 offences between October 2023 and June of this year – that led to a car being driven at speed the wrong way down the A66, the government retreated to its familiar narrative.

It seems the government’s all-purpose response to anything from reckless driving to violent extremism is to police social media. The government is constantly clamping down on a consequence rather than addressing a cause. This is deflection. And there’s a clear pattern.

Dave Selby is a career journalist writing on sailing and classic cars, author of The Impractical Boat Owner and co-author with Quentin Willson of The Ultimate Classic Car Book.