Theresa May is being advised to fine Facebook, Google, and Twitter over their abusive content

REUTERS/Toby Melville

Prime Minister Theresa May.

• Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other web firms are likely to face new sanctions in the UK about hosting abusive content on their platforms.
• The government's ethics committee will recommend that prime minister Theresa May sues the web giants if they can't delete abusive posts in time, according to The Times.
• It isn't clear how much the firms might have to pay, but they are more widely under huge political pressure to keep paedophilic and terrorist content off their platforms.

Prime minister Theresa May will be advised to sue Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other tech firms who don't delete abusive content, according to a report from The Times.

Abusive could mean racist, sexist, terrorist, and other hateful posts.

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The government's ethics watchdog is due to publish a report on Wednesday making the recommendations. Its suggestion for new laws would, in a major shift, begin treating the US web giants more like publishers. Conventionally, Facebook and Google have argued they are just platforms and not responsible for the content hosted on their sites in the way normal publishers are.

The report from the Committee on Standards in Public Life doesn't specify particular sanctions, but recommends legislation that could mean prosecution for firms that don't obey the rules.

The report is part of an inquiry into intimidation of MPs during elections, much of which takes place on social media. Chair Lord Bew previously said: "There is a degree of frustration in our committee about what's actually been done, given the vast resources of these companies, to protect the integrity of our democracy. We are less than hugely impressed by what they have done."

May has already proposed sterner rules for web firms, particularly when it comes to taking down terrorist content.

The committee report follow aggressive investigations by the press into the kind of content Twitter, Facebook, and Google are willing to put up with. A Tuesday report in The Sun found "hundreds" of Twitter users use the site to talk about their sexual urges towards children.

The Sun examined accounts that describe themselves as "non-offending" and "anti-contact" - terms used by self-confessed paedophiles who say they have never harmed children. The newspaper found some accounts of the talking about children, though it did not seem to find any examples of anything illegal or explicit. A Twitter source told the newspaper the information had been handed to the police, and that police had not requested further data.

Elsewhere, the BBC found Amazon-owned gaming site Twitch was hosting sexualised content, while YouTube has been under fire for several weeks over inappropriate content aimed at children.

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