Ms Elizabeth Farries:

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue on this occasion as well as when the committee most recently met with representatives of social media companies. It is a very important issue that requires more time and attention than it has received. It is a good start to focus on social media companies as it goes to the heart of the matter. The UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, has called for radical transparency from social media companies. He stated that there needs to be a radical disclosure of all information in a manner that is meaningful. Our perspective is that is not a radical request; it should be absolutely normative that social media companies be transparent in that way.

The Deputy asked what the ICCL has done on this issue. We issued two sets of submissions, both of which are available online and one of which regards content moderation generally and also the submissions to this committee specifically. I very much appreciated the Deputy's questioning of Karen White of Twitter regarding what that transparency means. The Deputy asked whether Twitter is disclosing what is going on in the background and being forthright in its quarterly publications. The ICCL agrees with Amnesty International that those publications do not go far enough. They present data, but those data are not meaningful. Amnesty International provides very specific suggestions on how to make the data meaningful. For example, the company may state that it took down content in a particular number of egregious situations and claim that is amazing. We would like to know the number of reports of abuse it receives per year which fail to receive a response from the company. We would like the reports to be disaggregated by category of abuse reported. Social media companies often highlight that they took down particular posts or pages. We would like to know the average time for such harmful material to be taken down. That question has been asked of the social media companies by the committee. We need to see that information transparently provided in their published reports, but that is not being done.