Britain’s security minister has told executives at YouTube, X - formerly known as Twitter - and Facebook to act speedily to remove “Hamas hate” content from their sites amid fears it may fuel radicalisation.

Tom Tugendhat said it was “incredibly important” that social media sites could not “be used to recruit, radicalise or spread hatred” in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel. 

The message was delivered in a series of face-to-face meetings in New York and San Francisco attended by the security minister during his trip to the US last week. 

Some of the Hamas fighters who killed more than 1,300 people in the Oct 7 attack live-streamed the atrocity on Facebook. Mr Tugendhat said the platform has acted swiftly to remove the footage.

One government figure familiar with the meetings said that Mr Tugendhat had delivered a “stern” message and expected social media bosses to act responsibly with regard to terror posts.

Mr Tugendhat revealed details of his trip and spoke about the escalating conflict in the Middle East in an interview with The Telegraph.

Tech executives may accidentally profit from terrorism

He said: “We were talking to tech executives. One of the things that came out in Southern Israel, as you’ll notice, was that there’s the absolutely tragic possibility, that I’m sure nobody wants, that some tech executives may accidentally be profiting from terrorism.

“And nobody wants that. Absolutely nobody wants to be capitalising on the pain of innocent Israelis and Palestinians or help Hamas achieve any of its objectives, which is to export division and hatred beyond the region.

“It was pretty striking that various social media outfits were extremely good at stopping it and were very responsive. Making sure that we’re working with them on this is incredibly important.”

Asked to sum up his core message to social media executives, Mr Tugendhat said: “It’s ‘make sure you know what’s on your platform, and ignorance is no excuse’. 

“If your platform is being used to promote hatred and division, then you are part of a network that is doing harm.”

He added: “Nobody wants to go from ‘California dreaming’ to Hamas hatred. It’s not the attitude we’re looking for and it’s not the attitude they want to spread.”

Mr Tugendhat is one of the few cabinet ministers with direct experience of military conflict, having been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan when he was a Royal Marine.

So he knows the challenges posed by the urban warfare faced by the Israelis as they prepare to invade Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s terror attacks.

Mr Tugendhat also talked about the challenges of such combat and vehemently defended Israel’s right to take the steps it deemed necessary to defend its people.

He added: “I can tell you that fighting in urban areas is unbelievably disorientating. Noise comes from all directions, people come from all directions, it’s incredibly difficult to know what’s going on. And I never fought in tunnels. 

“All I can say is that would just add to the complexity because you’re removing light and … it’s even hard to breathe. So I can’t imagine how difficult it would be.

“I spent the best part of 10 tours in the Middle East. And I can tell you, the cost is incredibly high. I lost friends, as you know, in Iraq and Afghanistan and it’s really difficult.

‘There is a cost to doing nothing’

“But the problem is, that’s not the only cost. There’s also a cost to doing nothing. If you don’t take action against an organisation that is literally trying to kill your people in their beds, quite literally trying to murder children and burn their bodies, then the cost is absolute failure.

“You simply can’t have a state where it is acceptable for a terrorist group that lives nearby to murder your citizens. You can’t operate like that. The cost of doing nothing is enormous, it’s unfathomable. It’s quite literally pogrom after pogrom.

 This [the Hamas attack] is the largest problem we’ve seen since 1945.”

Mr Tugendhat was promoted to the security minister role by Liz Truss after he ran for the Tory leadership last summer and kept the role when Mr Sunak became Prime Minister last October.

He has been a vocal critic of the Iranian regime but declined to speculate on whether Iran played a part in Hamas’s attack. However, he did criticise Tehran’s backing of the terror group.

“There is absolutely no question at all that the Iranian regime, that Tehran has been giving them the ammunition and training and the cash to conduct these operations” he said.

“Hamas, for years, was a small terrorist organisation in the region before it was picked up by Tehran and turned into a regional threat. And what we’re seeing now is the effect of that training in operation.”

Mr Tugendha also declined to say whether the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC], Iran’s military proxy, should be proscribed as a terror group, adding that the Government does not discuss such matters publicly.

On the search for British hostages taken by Hamas, Mr Tugendhat did not dispute that British intelligence was being used to help locate them.“We’ve offered all the help that we can to the Israeli government to make sure that we can help in any way possible,” he said.

“And, of course, you would expect us to stop at nothing to try and secure the release of British citizens wherever they are in the world.”

He declined to say whether he was directly in touch with the Qataris, who are seen by the UK Government as middle men in negotiations about hostage releases, or to call on Qatar to expel Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and former head, Khaled Meshaal, who regularly spend time in Doha, Qatar’s capital.