David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests today. I thank them for what they have said and for the work they are doing. I wonder what these social media platforms would be like if this work was not going on. None of us can even imagine the kind of content the moderators have to look at. Reference was made to post-traumatic stress disorder. During the First World War this was not recognised and people were shot because they had it and were determined as cowards. From what I can see and from what I know about this, post-traumatic stress disorder in cases of content moderators is very real. It must be dealt with and treated properly.

I will not go over what Deputy O'Reilly, Senator Crowe and others have already asked. Will the witnesses clarify if the pandemic has made things worse? We have heard that violence, domestic violence, and other forms of aggression have increased during the pandemic because people have been at home. Has this actually increased the awfulness, for want of a better word, of the content that moderators are looking at? Has anything been done to help with that?

The witnesses have spoken about the issue of non-disclosure. Will they tell us about working from home? Are moderators allowed to work from home or is this work deemed an essential service? If that is the case, does it make a difference if they are working from home?

I agree we should certainly invite the companies in as soon as possible. This is to be fair and to learn more about this. The issue is relatively new. When many of us here were children, social media did not exist and I would argue many people do not know about content moderation. In some ways it is a hidden employment, while being essential. We must consider what kind of society we are living in when the kind of stuff that is put up on social media is so awful that it causes post-traumatic stress disorder among the people who are charged with taking it down. There is a bigger question here about what kind of society we have.

I have heard of algorithms that are used to pick out certain issues and feed them to a certain kind of moderator, but I do not fully understand that. Perhaps the witnesses will tell us about it.

Are there legal actions before the courts at the moment on any of this? Are there legal actions on behalf of content moderators that are before the courts in Ireland or in any other jurisdictions, but especially in Ireland, in respect of this activity that is going on?