Mr. Ronan Costello:

The point on oversight and accountability is an important one. For example, with regard to our innovations around labelling of harmful and misleading information, one of our motivations for doing that is to give primacy to, and to promote content from, authoritative sources. For example, when we label content around elections and we say that this claim about the outcome of an election is disputed, we are basing that on the outcomes and the statements of the electoral commissions. In the recent presidential election in the United States, for example, it could be a state or county board, or something like that. One of the reasons we are doing that is not only to make the users’ experience on Twitter better or more reliable, so they are getting good quality information rather than poor quality information, but also because we would hope that it buttresses and reaffirms faith in those institutions that have oversight of these processes. We are relying on their determinations and want to give them primacy on our platform.

With respect to our own oversight and accountability, I will give an example. The policies we develop, be they around misleading information, abuse, harassment or hateful conduct, are developed in collaboration with our global trust and safety council, which is a collection of non-profit organisations, typically NGOs, expert groups and sometimes individuals who are experts in their respective areas. They say to us, for example, that we do not have a policy on something and we should have a policy on it, or that our policy on it is lacking and it is not taking account of trends in this particular area, and that we need to do some development work on it. That is an external body. All of those engage with us independently and their feedback is very candid.