Dr. Tijana Milosevic:

On the question about social media, when I said the platforms are doing what they can I was referring to established social media companies. I was advised not to name any specifically but it is along the lines of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, that is, the more established companies that have been around for a longer time and that have more resources. That is not enough, because there are many cases that are not dealt with effectively, but one of the challenges is the volume of content and the ability to monitor it adequately.

Another issue I would emphasise in regard to the large companies is there has to be more transparency in respect of how they do what they do and how they regulate the content. In the case of one company, for instance, my research team asked for an anonymised data set to help us optimise a machine-learning tool we were developing to assist it with cyberbullying on its platform, and it was not able to provide us with such a data set. There is not enough transparency for the wider research community outside of the large volume of research that is being conducted in the companies already, given that these companies tend to have their own research initiatives in house. They have access to all our data to do all that research, but they are not necessarily sharing it in a way that is helpful to our community of outside scholars to scrutinise their policies. They are being protective of their business models in ways that are not always transparent to us, and there has to be more transparency in that respect.

For the smaller companies, the problem is different. Very often, a start-up will gain considerable popularity in a short period and will not have the e-safety expertise. Such companies are too small, although they may have gained venture capital and are growing in popularity, so there has to be a system to make it a requirement for certain safety measures to be in place for smaller companies too. Smaller and larger companies, or the more established, older companies and younger companies, face different challenges. Where regulation can assist is in providing the requirements for the smaller companies to have certain standards of effectiveness. At the same time, when a large company tells us that it relies on artificial intelligence to proactively catch cyberbullying cases, it is not enough, in my view, for it to tell us it has caught a certain percentage of cases proactively. We have to be able to understand how that happens and why the company did not catch the cases where children have complained their case was not addressed. It is not enough for social media companies to work in a vacuum and to look solely at their responsibility. There has to be a collaboration between the broader educational system, as my colleagues have outlined, and the social media companies in this respect.

There is a great opportunity, in asking for resources from companies, to assist not only the educational system and also the counselling system. Given that they are established in certain countries and they are complying with the laws, more can be asked of the companies to assist in enhancing the capacity of the entire educational system.