Ms Sinéad McSweeney:

Over those 20 years, I have attended committee meetings such as this in many guises. I have been a transcriber who ensured there is a public record of the debates. I have been seated beside Ministers, Garda Commissioners and Sir Hugh Orde from the Police Service of Northern Ireland when he visited, but never thought I would be here myself speaking on my own behalf. However, I am delighted to be present to talk to members about Twitter. I propose to first answer the basic question as to what is Twitter. While many members use Twitter, some do not and it is important to lay the groundwork for the discussion. I then propose to discuss for a little bit why and how the vast majority of people use Twitter and then talk to members about our commitment to ensuring the experience of those who use Twitter is positive, enriching and safe, as well as the steps we take and resources we put in place to ensure this.

I will do this via a presentation because, as they say, a picture tells a thousand words. In essence, Twitter is a public communications platform. At its heart, Twitter effectively is built around small bursts of information, which we call tweets. Each one of those tweets can be no more than 140 characters long. It is similar to a text message and that was the genesis of the concept. In addition to text within these tweets, one can have photographs, videos, links to news stories and people can converse on Twitter and have an interaction between one other. The most important point is that users control their experience on the platform. They choose who to follow and what they wish to see. Moreover, they can indicate right at the outset if there are certain types of information they do not wish to see.

As for the company's position from a worldwide perspective, it now has 200 million active users worldwide. As members can see from the slide, the vast majority of that growth has taken place in the past two or three years. The company itself actually is quite small and literally is growing into the product and what the platform has become. Our headquarters is in San Francisco, while our international hub and EMEA headquarters is located here in Dublin and I am part of an ever-expanding team here. As I noted, it is evident that the real growth has taken place within the past three years. To put this in perspective, it took three years, two months and one day for Twitter to reach the one billionth tweet. We now turn over and see 1 billion tweets every two and a half days. This demonstrates the growth in the volume of information that is being shared on the platform. More than 60% of Twitter use is conducted on mobile telephones, while 70% of our users are outside of the United States and members can see the pockets of activity on the slide on display. Twitter increasingly is available in a range of languages and we are ever-expanding that agus táim fíor-bhródúil go bhfuil Gaeilge ann fresin.

There are many ways in which people use Twitter and a significant percentage of our users do not tweet at all. They use Twitter to listen to and see what other people are talking about in their own areas of interest. They are receiving, rather than producing information. I heard a lot of talk yesterday about the role Twitter now plays in politics and, clearly, it has been embraced at many levels of government worldwide. The slide on display shows a selection of some of the Heads of State and Government who now are on Twitter and who use it on a daily basis. Here in Ireland, the website merrionstreet.ie is very active in communicating messages and initiatives on the part of the Government, while the Opposition political parties are also highly active in this regard. It has proved to be a highly effective way of democratising government and humanising large institutions as well as enabling them to engage and converse with citizens on many different levels. In this context, none more so than the European Union, which traditionally citizens would have found to be inaccessible, but the Commission, the Council and the Parliament itself now actively use Twitter to reach out.

I will move on to why and how the vast majority of people use Twitter. Fundamentally they use it to connect to other people. They perceive it to be a fast and easy way to communicate with or simply listen to other people. Some connect to people they know while a great number of people decide to connect or listen to people they do not know but who they admire or in whom they are interested or about whose sphere of activity they wish to learn more. This goes right across the range of human endeavour. They may be interested in food, music, sport or subjects right across the vast areas of human interest. To give members some examples, some from here in Ireland include Rachel Allen, Maria Doyle Kennedy and, of course, as I must look after the home town, the Cork hurler Dónal Óg Cusack. Members can see the range and variety and the key point is if one is not interested in rugby and is only interested in hurling, one can just see information about hurling. One can choose one's experience and who it is from whom one wishes to hear on the platform.

Similarly, people come to Twitter for information, particularly information pertaining to real-time events. This has proved to be immensely valuable across a number of key areas. For example, police services are highly active on Twitter right across the world because they perceive it to be a means of communicating directly with citizens both in emergencies and to give information about incidents that have occurred in a particular area, such as, for example traffic updates. We also see amazing and innovative use of Twitter in education and health, as well as by non-governmental organisations. Again, it is easier to illustrate this point with examples. Obviously, I am particularly familiar with the Garda Síochána account, @GardaTraffic, which tweets information in and around major events to ensure people are aware of what is happening in a locality when something is happening. The account, @aaroadwatch, is a commercial equivalent and indicates to people what is going on in their areas on an hourly basis, minute by minute. The middle example on the slide, if members can see it, shows a history class in County Tipperary, where the teacher has chosen-----