Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 9 October 2019
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality
Online Harassment and Harmful Communications: Discussion (Resumed)
Mr. Ryan Meade:
Similarly, our community and content policies are global. One of the reasons they are so difficult to frame in the first place is that they have to be applied equally to all users. It can be tricky to develop a policy that is enforceable in all cases so that one reviewer looking at a piece of content in light of the policy will make more or less the same decision as another. We do a lot of work on testing our policies before we introduce them. For example we updated our policy on hate speech earlier this year. As others have said, these are areas where context is important. Before we launched that policy we carried out extensive testing with reviewers in different parts of the world to ensure to the greatest degree possible that it was enforceable, in the sense that when a rule-violating piece of content was identified, a decision could be made on it that would not be arbitrary. In other words, a similar decision would be made regardless of who the reviewer was or the identity of the user posting the content.
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