Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 7 November 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

Session 2: Industry Perspective

Mr. Tom Packalén:

I thank all the guests for their presentations. Many of them have done a good job and we are going in a better direction. It is important companies take on their responsibilities beforehand. We must have tight regulation with respect to what is bad and difficult for everyone.

My question is for Dr. Bickert. With respect to false information, I understand it is very difficult to say what is false. Something is false for one person and means something else to another person but hate speech is a much easier target to discuss. For example, in Sri Lanka, people were burned alive because of the hate speech spread through Facebook. In Myanmar, there was violence against the Rohingya minority. I refer to what Facebook has done to prevent this. It has more than 10,000 moderators, as Dr. Bickert mentioned, but what can it do with them? The only way to address this is with an artificial intelligence, AI, solution. Mark Zuckerberg told the US Senate in April 2018 that it might take five to ten years to have this kind of technology but that is not true. A Finish company, Utopia Analytics, has offered to build Facebook a model in two weeks to get rid of the hate speech content originating in Sri Lanka but Facebook was not interested in it. Many companies do AI moderation. Will Dr. Bickert explain a little why Facebook will not go deeper into tackling hate speech and why it believes, with more than 10,000 moderators, it can handle billions of messages?

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.