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Ex-MI6 chief claims it was 'almost impossible' for Facebook to catch Lee Rigby terror chat

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By John McCarthy, Opinion Editor

November 26, 2014 | 3 min read

A former head of MI6 has defended Facebook from criticism for failing to intercept a conversation from the murderer of Lee Rigby planning the attack.

Intelligence agencies pointed the finger at Facebook

Richard Barrett, previously an anti-terror director at MI6, doubted Facebook had the resources to flag up suspect conversations on the site due to the sheer mass of content it hosts.

He was speaking in response to the news that Lee Rigby killer Michael Adebowale discussed his “desire to murder a soldier in the most explicit and emotive manner” on the social network before carrying out the attack, a discussion that Facebook came under fire for missing.

Barrett told BBC Radio 4: “Facebook has about one and a third billion users and about five billion posts a day so clearly on a worldwide basis it would be almost impossible to deal with the amount of stuff that was referred.

“And even in the United Kingdom there are about 25 million users of Facebook and so let’s say possibly about 125 million posts a day. And even if you take out all the pictures of kittens which were put up you’d still be left with an awful lot to go through and then quite a percentage of those perhaps would be passed on for the police or security services to look at. So it would be an enormous task, I think.”

He concluded: “I think it’s very hard to talk about the social responsibility of a multinational company… Facebook is operating in probably almost all counties in the world so will that social responsibility vary… I think it’s quite a burden to put on Facebook to decide where their social responsibility lies in all different circumstances.”

In response to the allegations that it dropped the ball in the run up to the attack Facebook issued a statement: “We do not allow terrorist content on the site and take steps to prevent people from using our service for these purposes.”

Earlier this month, Robert Hannigan, the new head of GCHQ, accussed firms including Facebook, Google and Twitter of becoming the ‘command and control networks of choice’ for terrorists.

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