Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham says there may need to be tighter regulation of social media to tackle growing levels of racism.
He was speaking in the wake of far right riots across the UK triggered by the murder of three young girls in Southport.
A number of people have already been jailed for stirring up racial hatred and violence online through social media following the Southport attacks.
Burnham, who is now in his third term at Greater Manchester Mayor after a 16-year career as an MP, said social media firms must decide if they want to be a force for good or the catalyst for division.
“After living through what we have in the last few days I’d be grateful if we draw breath and start to talk to the social media companies,” he told BusinessCloud.
“The negativity of social media is outweighing the positivity at the moment. Do they want social media to be a force for good or is the intent to allow it to continue to divide society?
“If it’s latter, the regulatory approach is going to have to change significantly.”
Burnham said society had changed since he was elected as an MP in 2001.
He said: “We’ve had at least 15 years of social media and I would say political life has got progressively harder in each of those years and society has become more polarised in that same period.
“It’s been driven by social media. We’ve lost the nuance and the common ground. Everything gets pushed to extremes.
“I go on ‘X’ now and I can’t avoid what I’d call ‘extreme racism’. You can’t go on there now and not see it quite quickly.
“That is a massive change. In my early days in politics, if someone was vocalising those statements, criminal action would have followed quickly.
“Now it seems there’s so much of this stuff nobody can do anything about it.”
Tensions have escalated in recent days after X’s controversial owner, Elon Musk, claimed on the platform that ‘civil war is inevitable’ following violent unrest in the UK.