Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:

I outlined some of this earlier when I was responding to Deputy O'Callaghan. Facebook has a real-name policy, although that is not the same as authenticating every person on the platform. We require people to use the name by which they are known in real life. If an account is suspected to be false, we will act on that and ensure either that the person verifies it or, if he or she is not who he or she claims, that it will be removed. We also take strong measures against fake accounts that people try to establish on our platform. In the first quarter of this year, we removed 2.2 billion accounts from our platform. That figure does not include the accounts we stopped or prevented from being set up in the first instance. They are accounts that managed to be set up but were caught within minutes.

I mentioned a couple of the issues relating to what such a system would look like. At the global level at which we operate, what would the system of authentication or verification look like and what sort of requirements or burden would it put on the user to be able to access our services? We are not dismissing such issues out of hand but rather they are the types of questions that arise. We are working hard on the issue of age verification for children's accounts, which is just a small subset of the wider question of authenticating accounts. The types of steps we are taking in that regard include enabling AI to detect where somebody has submitted an age of, say, 20 but where it is clear the pattern of their behaviour does not match that of a 20 year old. While we do not have the answer just yet, we are examining and exploring the area. As some of the other guests and I noted, it is for legislators to make a decision on what is required. We can offer our opinions on what such a system might look like and we are happy to have more in-depth conversations on the matter.