FBI, DHS and social media firms like Meta, TikTok aren't adequately addressing threat of domestic extremists, Senate report says

An investigation by the Senate Homeland Security Committee alleges that the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and leading social media companies are not adequately addressing the growing threat of domestic terrorism, especially white supremacist and anti-government extremists.

In a 128-page report obtained by NBC News, the committee’s majority Democrats say federal law enforcement agencies have not appropriately allocated resources to match the metastasizing threat, and have failed to systematically track and report data on domestic terrorism incidents, as required by federal law.

“Unfortunately, our counterterrorism agencies have not effectively tracked the data that you need to measure this threat,” Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Wednesday. “If they’re not tracking it, it’s likely they are not prioritizing our counterterrorism resources to effectively counter this threat.”

In a statement, the FBI said it is “agile” and adjusts resources to meet the latest threats, while DHS said that "addressing domestic violent extremism is a top priority" for the department.

A Meta spokesperson pointed to the company's most recent Community Standards Enforcement Report, which highlights what the spokesperson described as a low prevalence of terror and organized hate content on Facebook and Instagram. A top executive, Nick Clegg, said last year, “The reality is, it’s not in Facebook’s interest — financially or reputationally — to continually turn up the temperature and push users towards ever more extreme content.”

A TikTok spokesperson said in a statement, “We believe that maintaining a safe and trusted platform is critical to our long-term success, which is why we are dedicated to identifying and removing content that incites or glorifies violence or promotes violent extremist organizations.”

A YouTube spokeswoman said the platform is acting to block extremist content. Twitter did not immediately provide comment in response to a request.

The report found that the FBI and DHS continue to spend more on international terrorism, despite saying for years that domestic terrorism now poses a greater threat to Americans.

The investigation also found that social media companies “have failed to meaningfully address the growing presence of extremism on their platforms,” and that the business models of four leading social media outlets — Meta, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube — are based on maximizing user engagement, growth, and profits, which incentivizes increasingly extreme content.

“These companies point to the voluminous amount of violative content they remove from their platforms, but the investigation found that their own recommendations algorithms and other features and products play in the proliferation of that content in the first place,” the report said. “Absent new incentives or regulation, extremist content will continue to proliferate on these platforms and companies’ content moderation efforts will continue to be inadequate to stop its spread.”

The report’s analysis of the FBI and DHS response to domestic terrorism appears to have been hampered by a lack of data. For example, the committee said neither agency provided complete information on how many employees and how much money were devoted to combating domestic terrorism, despite a 2020 law requiring them to do so.

Although experts say the threat from domestic violent extremists has been building for years, the committee found that arrests and federal charges in domestic terrorism cases involving the FBI had been steadily declining before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Arrests and charges in domestic extremism cases have since spiked, but the bulk of them are related to the Capitol riot investigation.

The report suggests that despite prioritizing domestic violent extremism in recent years, the FBI appears quicker to call an attack terrorism when it was carried out in the name of jihadist ideology than white supremacist beliefs.

Both DHS and FBI define “homegrown violent extremists” as terrorists inspired by foreign ideologies. The report points out that the people accused of killing 23 people in El Paso, Texas, and 10 people in Buffalo, New York, were not given that designation though they reportedly claimed inspiration from the international terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, among other racist and antisemitic ideologies.

At the same time, the FBI categorized a Muslim man who killed U.S. military personnel in a July 2015 mass shooting that killed four U.S. Marines and a Navy sailor in Tennessee as a homegrown violent extremist, “despite not having information on which international terrorist organization supposedly inspired the attack,” the report said.