Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 17 April 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

Online Advertising and Social Media (Transparency) Bill 2017 and the Influence of Social Media: Discussion

2:00 pm

Mr. Joel Kaplan:

I will try to go as quickly as I can and I am going to tag on a bunch of replies to Deputy Ryan and others. I will start with Deputy Lawless's questions. The first question had to do with how technically feasible it is to enforce transparency around issue ads relative to electoral ads. I believe that was the question. It is a very astute question because that is exactly the issue we are struggling with and that we are trying to solve. A couple of months ago we started trying to build the transparency tools for electoral ads because that is easier for the artificial intelligence to detect - for instance, discussion of a candidate's name. Discussion of issues and issue ads come in such varied form and involve familiarity and understanding of the nuance and the context involved. The state of artificial intelligence and machine learning is still developing. With the combination of artificial intelligence and the significant investment in resources in hiring, literally, thousands more people just to focus on this question, we think we will be able to review and capture most issue ads. Artificial intelligence may not detect some which are classifiers and we will have to rely on our users to report them and then have the manual reviewers address that.

That is why this takes some time. Our engineers are working furiously trying to build it and deploy it, but that is why it is going to take a least several months before that capability is live on the site.

In terms of the dataset, I believe we were asked if we ever sold data. This is one matter I want to be super-clear on. We do not sell people's data.

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.