ANTI-RACISTS urged money-making sites such as Twitter and Facebook yesterday to ban the perpetrators of Islamophobic, anti-semitic and racist hate online.

They accused social media sites of often giving “free rein” to those spreading racist views, while the responsibility for reporting hatemongering accounts currently lies with users.

Campaign group Hope Not Hate has warned that, unless corporations stop giving space to hate merchants, the far right will creep further into the mainstream and continue to grow.

The group's senior researcher Joe Mulhall said that social media organisations argue that it is not illegal and is “free speech.”

He told those gathered at Hope Not Hate's anti-Islamophobia conference in Camden, London: “We have to get better at fighting the far right with it creeping into mainstream.”

Researchers revealed that, between March and November this year, racist English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson saw his number of Twitter followers jump from 60,000 to 385,000.

It dramatically increased during the months when there were terror attacks in Manchester, London Bridge and north London’s Finsbury Park attack on Muslims and spiked during the Parsons Green attack.

Research by Hope Not Hate shows that Islamophobes have “strengthened the impression that Islam is an imminent threat to Western society” by using manipulating accounts on Twitter, i.e. using automated bots and buying followers.

Anti-Muslim websites are also alarmingly growing in popularity, activists heard.

This year, with the election of Donald Trump in the US and far-right parties across Europe becoming more prominent, the issue has become much harder to tackle, Mr Mulhall said, adding: “There is incredibly toxic language around Muslims.

“It's unleashed something we're going to have to deal with,” he said, pointing out that anti-Muslim movements often spring up as a result of social-economic climates.

He said: “There was a time when, if you wanted to hear conspiratorial ideas about Muslims taking over, you would have been listening to someone with a loudhailer in a car park somewhere.

“But now you can hear it in parliament chambers across Europe and from the president of the USA in some senses. It's terrifying. We know how to deal with EDL, but we have to get better with it creeping into the mainstream.”

In a year that has seen National Front’s Marine Le Pen win a third of the vote in France's presidential elections this year and Germany's Alternative for Germany party attract 13 per cent of the vote, anti-Muslim assaults reached their highest since 2001. Following the terror attacks in Paris, hate crime against the Muslim community rose from 113 in 2014 to over 400 in 2015.

Lallab, a Muslim feminist organisation in France, condemned the way anti-Muslim sentiment has crept into women's daily lives in France, with “completely abhorrent” debates.

Co-founder Sarah Zouak said: “We just continually hear talk about Muslim women in France without giving them a voice.

“People speak in our place and it reaches the point where they tell us how to think, what to wear, whether we're allowed to go to the beach, whether we're allowed to go to university.”