The US Government has refused to sign a declaration with more than a dozen other countries pledging to stamp out terrorist and extremist content from appearing online. According to a report in The Daily Telegraph, the White House has claimed it is ‘not in a position to join the endorsement’ despite backing the overarching goal of the pledge. A spokesperson said the US Government believed ‘the best tool to defeat terrorist speech is productive speech’. The governments of countries, including the UK, France, Canada, Australia and Ireland, joined major technology companies this week in signing a pledge to combat terrorism and extreme content online during a summit prompted by the Christchuch mosque attacks in March. The session, hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in Paris, follows the massacre of 50 people at two mosques in New Zealand which was live-streamed on social media and widely shared around the world. Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Google and Amazon have all pledged to ‘fight hatred’ through new measures to tackle extreme content online. But members of the governing Republican Party have repeatedly criticised tech giants' attempts to crack down on hate speech as censorship which they claim is unfairly targeted at mainstream conservative views.