James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Two allegations have been made against Facebook. One is that it promotes addictive behaviours in order to keep users on the platform. The second is that it has exploited its dominant position in some ways. An example that brings those two behaviours together is Facebook's advocacy for video content in recent years. I am told that the statistics for video content supplied by Facebook internationally and in various reports were such that the primacy of video content was exaggerated and boosted to the extent that it was way over the scale in terms of what was actually being seen. Video content was being reported as having such a humongous reach that newsrooms and media organisations began to recalibrate their offering, packages and reporting to model this trend but the video statistics, as reported, were a gross exaggeration of the reality being experienced on the platform. Is that the case?