Ms Claire Rush:

As Mr. Ó Broin mentioned at the outset, hate speech, as a large bucket of harmful content, is one area where our policies arguably go further than current legislation in Ireland. That is an area that might be ripe for future consideration. It can be difficult when reviewing a piece of content without the surrounding circumstances to know whether, in theory, it would rise to the level of incitement. It is very hard to know that when there is a vitriolic or malicious attack on a person. Our position is that making derogatory threats or statements or dehumanising speech is not allowed, even if the content is perfectly lawful within a jurisdiction, and we will still take it down if it violates our policies.

One example of a fairly successful self-regulatory regime is the EU code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech. That tests us on our responsiveness in taking down illegal hate speech as swiftly as possible. We go through rounds of testing, most recently at the end of 2018. After that test, the EU Commission observed that the most serious types of hate speech, that is credible threats, had the highest rate of removal at 82% whereas in more nuanced speech, where it was difficult to make a determination whether or not it constituted incitement or if it was insulting language, that a greater balance had to be struck, and it seemed as though the signatory companies were trying to take that balancing exercise very seriously when assessing the content.