Last week, the UK government quietly announced that a new unit in Whitehall would begin sifting through complaints from the public about 'hate, extremism and terrorism online'. In what seems to be the result of four years of civil service head-scratching about how to design a delivery mechanism for the Section 3("notice-and-takedown", NTD) provisions of the Terrorism Act 2006, the result is probably the most benign mechanism Whitehall could come up with to assuage pressure groups (both internal and external) whilst saving political face.

Under the new initiative, the government is enlisting the help of the internet-using public to find and report on various types of content and behaviour deemed illegal under the provisions of the Terrorism Acts of 2000 and 2006. To its credit the Home Office states, “most hateful or violent website content is not illegal. While you may come across a lot of things on the internet that offend you, very little of it is actually illegal.” That’s an important message, although I guess it will be some time before we know if it sufficiently discourages axe-grinders from submitting various types of legal content to the new Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit.

There may be some utility to this measure. It signals that certain types of material that fall foul of counterterrorism legislation will not be tolerated in the UK. As such, it will bolster government's promotion of its 'values' in this area, as well as contributing in some small way to making "the internet a more hostile environment for terrorists and violent extremists who seek to exploit modern technology", as the press release claims. However, as a genuine bulwark against violent extremism it is a non-starter and will certainly fail to deliver on government's stated objectives of reducing radicalisation and countering violent extremism online. For a start, even if such a scheme―assuming it can maintain any kind of visibility, which is unlikely―succeeded in driving all illegal internet material currently served by UK persons and companies to foreign locations, this content would still be accessible to those who look for it.

This criticism relates to a mere practicality but there is a more important issue. This looks very like policy retrospectively trying to justify poor legislation. Recall that the Section 3 provisions of the Terrorism Act 2006 have never been used, partly because the police―who are charged with serving NTDs―have consistently backed away from being the ones to adjudicate on what might be lawful or not in contentious areas like the 'glorification of terrorism'. Rather than just accept that if they were really serious about prosecuting UK citizens and companies for hosting certain types of material that breach any number of much older established statutes regarding incitement, racial hatred, etc, this government persists in attempting to justify badly drafted legislation under the rubric of counterterrorism policy.

Why a specific reporting mechanism for terrorism? We have one for child abuse, surely a near-universal taboo, but we don’t bother for much else. Why not any other crimes? If it's deeply-held cultural convictions and social norms that the government is trying to uphold, why resort to highly contentious legislation borne of fear and panic, rather than existing legislation that, quite apart from having been successfully tested many times in the courts, directly reflects those norms and values upon which British society claims to be based, pre-9/11?

This government, in common with most others, has yet to make a firm case demonstrating even the weakest causal relationship between internet 'content', 'radicalisation', and 'violent extremism'. Sure, it crops up in the biographies of many terrorists as a behavioural indicator, but many other things do too. This is not a disingenuous statement, and it should not be up to academics, civil servants and rights activists to refute the case for regulation of expression. Rather, it is up to government to make the case for it, and it has yet to do so.

So much for evidence-based policy. In 2002, in a speech to the Economic and Social Research Council, then Home Secretary David Blunkett said, "this government has given a clear commitment that we will be guided not by dogma but by an open-minded approach to understanding what works and why." Unless this government is sitting on a body of data that has thus far eluded the world’s academic community, I suggest that even a small thing like the new internet referral unit shows how hollow this claim sounds now. On its own, this initiative is unlikely to do much damage―nor achieve much of anything, to be frank―but one has to wonder at the institutional processes that more-or-less demanded something like it, for better or for worse.