Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 1 August 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

Moderation of Violent and Harmful Content on the Facebook Platform: Discussion

12:00 pm

Ms Niamh Sweeney:

No. Outsourcing helps us to fix the problem in the sense that we have hired 3,000 people just to review content in the past year. We are hiring massively across the company. When I joined in 2015, there were 12,500 staff. We are now close to a figure of 30,000 and the number is growing rapidly all of the time. If Facebook's internal human resources function was to try to hire 3,000 people for the purposes of moderation, it would greatly slow the rate at which we could hire. Millions of CVs come to the company every week. Outsourcing means that we can scale rapidly in one region if there is an uptick in reports relating to it. It gives us much greater flexibility.

The problem is that gaps have been clearly identified in the programme between how our policies are being executed and how training is delivered. We need to fix that. I would be the first to admit that it is not a perfect system.

On the question of a sectoral tax, I do not know that sectoral taxes ever worked particularly well. We invest heavily in resources to address issues like bullying, self-harm and all of that. Later on this year we will make a sizeable announcement, with a local partner, about an anti-bullying programme. There will be more information on that after this summer.

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