Ms Niamh Sweeney:

I will answer the questions first. I agree with Deputy Lowry that six years is too long for us to have left the video on the platform given that the child had been brought to safety in 2012.

I hope I am answering the right question; I wrote down my answer but I forgot to write down the question. I hope I am addressing the questions accurately. The point made by the Deputy relates to the issues raised, which are serious and are being taken seriously. It should be remembered that the undercover reporter involved was at the CPL location for seven weeks and we saw one hour of footage. I hope that much of the remaining footage captured Facebook's system working and people executing policies properly and making the right content decisions. We obviously do not have access to that content but I do not want to suggest to the committee that the system is broken entirely.

The hate speech test referred to in our opening statement was overseen by the European Commission. We have had some success in self-regulating across all of these issues. Success is perhaps the wrong word to use but we have been most effective in addressing child sexual exploitation imagery, for which there has been a global co-ordinated effort of which we are a key member. However, where there is human review there will be human error, therefore I cannot tell the committee today that there will be no examples of mistakes being made in the future. Unfortunately that is the situation we are in. We are trying to deploy technology more often with greater effect and that will improve over time.

Deputy Eamon Ryan made a point about some of the upsetting videos that have circulated in Ireland in the past. That content pre-dated the media matching technology or image and video matching technology that can prevent that kind of video from being re-uploaded. I think the specific example from Slane would not happen today because it would be prevented from being re-uploaded. That does not mean that people would not continue to store the video and share it peer-to-peer but it certainly would not appear on our platform again.