Alan Farrell (Dublin Fingal, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses. While I will do my best to focus on the committee's hearings on children, youth affairs and cybersecurity, fake news is a big issue for social media platforms, including the witnesses' own platform, although it is not as organised here as the much written about events of November 2016 in the United States.

I am coming at the sort of incendiary article which can pop up written by individuals targeting younger people or individual groups within a community or a school or something like that. The biggest problem the witnesses have identified and that I can clearly see is understanding whether something is being put out there to highlight wrongdoing or to incite wrongdoing. Ms Cummiskey's example was a good means of illustrating the difficulty in allowing artificial intelligence, apps or bots to present certain information as a page, as Ms Cummiskey illustrated, when in fact it has a duplicitous meaning and outcome. She mentioned attempts to tackle that across her platform. I have a question on the sort of resources being put into that issue, particularly given that Ms Cummiskey knows the demographics. Deputy Rabbitte raised an interesting point about the demographics using the platform. How many resource hours are being put into the development of schemes to prevent individuals being targeted, either through nefarious fake news providers or a bully in a classroom, school or community?