Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:

I will come in now. I thank the Deputy for her questions. We agree that Ireland has an opportunity to show global leadership in effective regulation, not just of online political advertising, but of a whole range of other issues. Harmful online content is also central to that.

I want to make a few points. Our strategy on misinformation is threefold: remove, reduce and inform. What the Deputy has referred to concerns the reduce piece. Those 80 she referred to are not Facebook employees. They are 80 employees of third-party organisations that we work with to whom we refer content that has been flagged as possibly being false. Those organisations carry out checks on whether the content is true. In Ireland, Journal.ie is the third-party fact checker. That is where that figure of 80 comes from.

Ensuring the integrity of democratic processes and elections involves a much broader group of people right across the company. I believe there are around 40 teams involved in this work. To give the committee a sense of the amount of content we remove, between October and December 2020, we removed 12 million pieces of content from Facebook that were misinformation which could lead to physical harm. In that same period, of the content, 167 million pieces of content that was rated as false by fact checkers was reduced in its circulation.

On the issue of page administration, the central point is the person who is running ads in Ireland must be in Ireland. There are other activities such as moderating discussions and using the safety tools we put in place for page administrators to moderate discussions on pages themselves. The Deputy also mentioned commenting. That is all possible as a page administrator.