Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:

There is AI working on different patterns of behaviour relating to fake accounts. If somebody makes a comment about a politician and the politician feels that the account is not a real person, he or she can flag that to us and we can then put that account into a cross-check where the account has to be authorised. The account holder then has to provide proof of identity to us. While I understand the conversation about verification of accounts and the reasons for it, it raises a wider question about the operation of the Internet. We would essentially be required to verify all users globally before they could use our systems. There are a number of considerations, including whether the system of identification is available in each country. Are people ruled out from using our services because they do not have access to an ID? In Ireland, for example, there is a cost to obtain ID. That is not to say that we do not take the issue of child sexual abuse extremely seriously. We take proactive steps. As others have said, we have zero tolerance for this type of behaviour. There are genuine concerns about how proof of identity would operate and whether us holding all of that information about more than 2.7 billion people globally would respect the data minimisation principles within the general data protection regulation, GDPR. That is not to say that we are not looking at this as something that we have to do better. We are looking at artificial intelligence to determine whether it can assist us in verifying accounts. We talk about fake accounts and removing them. In the first quarter of this year, we removed 2.2 billion fake accounts from our platform, 99% of them before they were reported to us. We take the issues of authenticity and child sexual abuse extremely seriously.