CANBERRA, March 20 (Xinhua) -- Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has insisted that far-right groups are being treated as a "serious" terror threat following the Christchurch attacks.
News Corp Australia on Wednesday reported that no far-right groups in Australia currently meet the criteria to be officially listed as a terrorist organization.
Responding to that report on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio on Wednesday, Morrison said that intelligence agencies have been gathering "quite a bit" of intelligence regarding white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups for a long time.
"I think it's serious and I think it always has been and that's why on a federal level our agencies have all taken it seriously," he told the ABC.
"The work they've done over a long period of time I think has greatly assisted us, especially in recent days.
"When it comes to our knowledge of white supremacists or separatists or other extreme groups like this, we have got quite a bit of intelligence in these areas and it does go back quite a way on these groups."
The monitoring of right-wing extremism in Australia has become a major issue since Australian man Brenton Tarrant was charged with murder after the terror attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, which have so far left 50 people killed and 50 others injured.
Morrison has launched an attack against the technology giants that allowed the distressing footage to be shared so widely and will make regulating the "ungoverned" platforms a key agenda item at June G20 meeting in Japan if he is still prime minister after May's general election.
Mitch Fifield, the minister for communications, confirmed on Wednesday that he, Morrison and Attorney-General Christian Porter will meet with executives from Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter next Tuesday to discuss their response to the attacks.
"In the wake of Christchurch ... the government has started looking at measures to address the ways digital platforms were used and abused," he told News Corp Australia on Wednesday.
"The time has come for those who own and manage platforms to accept a greater responsibility for how they're used.
"A best-endeavors approach is no longer good enough. It's clear that while social media companies have cooperated with authorities to remove some of that disgusting content, more needs to be done. If they won't act, we need to."
According to data released by Facebook, more than 1.5 million videos of the attack was removed from its platform in the 24 hours after the incident, 1.2 million of which were identified and deleted before they were uploaded.
