Ms Anna Morgan:

The Senator raised the issue of user-generated content and complaints about it that land on our desk. He also asked about the types of complaints, the age profile of complainants and the volume of complaints of this nature. We currently have around 80 user-generated complaints. I understand none of these relates to minors or those under 18 years. In general, the nature of the complaints is that a person has had a post placed on a platform that relates to him or her and the complainant is unhappy about it, finds it offensive or threatening or may consider it defamatory. The difficulty for complainants is that because they are objecting to the nature of the content in question rather than asserting that there has been some sort of infringement insofar as the rules around data protection are concerned, when we go about evaluating that complaint, we must do so within the framework of the data protection regime. That means, first, trying to establish whether there is a control, process or relationship in being, because that is the cornerstone of the application of GDPR and the 2018 Act. We must also look at whether there is a lawful basis for the processing of those data.

Complications will generally arise when we put the complain to the platform. It will often tell us that it does not believe there has been an infringement of personal data. Platforms are generally only prepared to remove that sort of content when there has been an infringement of their community standards or terms of use. That process of going back and forth between the complainant and platform must necessarily be an iterative one. As we said in our written submissions to the committee and opening statement, we do not have the power to order the immediate takedown of content on the basis of the content alone. Instead, we must embark on a process of tracing through the various rules in the GDPR.

It is a complicated process that frequently does not yield an outcome with which the complainant is satisfied. It very much depends on the attitude of the platform in question, particularly when we intervene, as to whether it is prepared to take down that content.