Ms Cori Crider:

I would say it is an international phenomenon across the board because ultimately the entity driving the NDAs as they are distributed is Facebook. It is not simply one NDA. It is a series of documents people are made to sign and which they are not then generally given a copy of.

We engaged with the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment about this question of NDAs when we had the meeting in January. I now can see from the letter I received at 7.04 p.m. yesterday that the Tánaiste did then ask. Facebook wrote back in February stating that all the content moderators needed to do if they wanted to get a copy of their NDAs was simply ask, but that is not consonant with our experience. What happened was, in advance of the meeting of content moderators with the Tánaiste in January, we wrote to Facebook and to one of the outsourcing firms stating these people were about to speak about their workplace conditions, they needed some reassurance from them, that we had said it was lawful but asked the companies if they could confirm it, and if they could disclose all of the documentation they said applied to these people's right to speak. The outsourcing firm never replied in advance of that meeting. Facebook wrote back stating the content moderators know what their obligations were and it would not give them anything. After the meeting, the companies told the content moderators they needed to put in a subject access request under the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR. We put in a subject access request under the GDPR, there was an endless back and forth, and we have received some documentation. However, I have good reason to believe it is not all of the relevant documentation on confidentiality.

It may well be, by the way, that if the companies were required to publish this information, disclose it, give it over in the course of events and give it to an independent legal examiner, it would be something like a paper tiger, that a lawyer who read it would say it does not prevent a person from raising legitimate workplace grievances and that there has been an effort to talk workers out of raising legitimate issues that is much farther than what the law would allow. Content moderators are not lawyers, however; they should not have to be lawyers. They should be able to get the documents without having someone like me shepherd through a subject access request to do it. That has been the problem - identifying what it is that these companies even claim restricts these people.