Cracking down on Facebook won’t stop teenagers being radicalised

I’ve yet to meet an oncologist, thank God. But if I did turn up to be told I had cancer I wouldn’t expect him to start treating me with a chainsaw. That was my thought this morning when I read that our national counter-terrorism chief had described the effect of exposing kids to violent content online as carcinogenic. Matt Jukes, Asistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations for the Met Police, suggested that a ban on social media for the under 16s was a way to address the scourge of adolescent maniacs mobilised by online extremism who turn hateful thought into lethal action.

Jukes said: ‘To go back to the gap between finding smoking was harming people and really acting on it and harming young people and acting on it, this cancer, the content which is driving violence, is in our communities and in the lives of young people now.