Ms Karen White:

We have talked quite a lot about hate speech and how we apply our policies at Twitter. Twitter has a hateful conduct policy. It outlines that it is against our rules to promote violence against, threaten or attack others on the basis of a range of protected categories such as gender and race. Twitter's focus is on behaviour over content in particular. It is much easier to identify certain types of abusive behaviours and scale that than solely looking at hate speech which is highly subjective and often context dependent. Twitter is somewhat unique in that it is a public communications platform. We are looking at behaviours of different types of accounts. Our systems can proactively detect if, for instance, one account is @-mentioning another account repeatedly and that account does not follow them. That might signal to us that someone is engaging in some level of abusive behaviour or if there is some sort of dog-piling with an attack on another account. Sometimes we take a variety of these signals in combination to give us some indication that we need to review an account for hateful conduct or abusive behaviour. I can assure the Deputy that our policies are applied consistently across the board. When violations are found actions are taken. There are various actions, which I outlined, that we can take beginning with the outright suspension of an account. We have vastly improved the stopping of repeat offenders coming back to Twitter by setting up another account and leveraging our own technology; we are finding new ways to do that and to stop them coming back to Twitter to engage in the same behaviours. There are those on our service who set up what we classify as sole purpose accounts where they engage in nothing more than abusing others. That type of behaviour is reviewed against our policies and we take appropriate action. There is a range of actions we can take. We also introduced a change to our hateful conduct policy on dehumanisation. Research shows that dehumanising language leads to offline violence. We have made a change to our hateful conduct policy in regard to religious groups. We will continue to iterate on those.

Mr. Costello might talk to some of our efforts with NGOs with whom we work.