UK riots: Hate video remained on YouTube even after conviction

“We are in contact with law enforcement and are supporting them in every way we can,” a spokesperson for Meta said.

The social media firms were already set to face new legislation, but there is now pressure to tighten that even further.

The UK’s Online Safety Act, a broad new set of laws to protect people online, with penalties for social media companies hosting dangerous content, was officially passed last year. While law enforcement in the UK can already hold people accountable for what they say online, the act pushes liability onto the companies themselves for not moderating illegal content.

However, the laws have yet to be fully implemented with enforcement not expected until next year.

And even when those powers are in place, they won’t go far enough when dealing with misinformation, with the new legislation unlikely to be of use to police when dealing with incidents like the most recent riots, lawyers said.

“Whilst the Home Secretary may have said ‘if it’s a crime offline, it’s a crime online,’ and whilst that may be correct, the Online Safety Act provides no additional support to the pre-existing criminal law covering incidents of incitement of violence,” said Mark Jones, a lawyer at Payne Hicks Beach.

UK government officials are now considering revisiting key parts of the Online Safety Act, according to people familiar with the situation. The last government watered down the bill, removing language that would have regulated “legal but harmful” content in order to allay concerns of free speech campaigners. London Mayor Sadiq Khan told the Guardian newspaper it was “not fit for purpose” in its current form.

For cases like Parlour’s and Johnson’s, prosecutors are relying on the Public Disorder Act from 1986, traditionally used for rioters who stir up disorder in person rather than online. The Criminal Prosecution Service has managed to get these offenses through the backlogged courts more swiftly than usual with fast-tracked convictions.

It took just a day for Tyler Kay, 26, to be arrested and charged with intending to stir up racial hatred online after a series of anti-immigration posts on X, formerly Twitter. He pleaded guilty after a post on Aug. 7 calling for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set alight and another inciting violence against an immigration lawyer. He was jailed for 38 months, prosecutors said.