Mr. John Church:

That is a good question, which we ask ourselves all the time. We in the ISPCC have a number of children advisory committees. We get 800 to 1,000 contacts from children every day. While that is many children and a mini omnibus in itself, we still like to have qualitative input from children. Through the ISPCC and other organisations, there would be a good opportunity to set something up formally. We would be happy to facilitate that. That would be my thinking on the first question.

On the Senator's statement about community standards and the platforms, we interact with all the platforms. We have an open, transparent relationship. We were talking to Facebook this week and know it will be at the committee next week. While what it is putting in place is admirable to some degree, with various tools and software to prevent this, one only has to look at the number of images and harmful content that it takes down regularly to tell one how big it is. If there was a question that the committee wanted to probe with it, it would be the aspect of shareholder value versus the protection of the child. Our concern in the ISPCC is that one is traded off against the other. We have quarterly meetings with such companies as Facebook, TikTok, etc. While super things are happening and the investment is admirable, it is nowhere near what it should be doing. We in the ISPCC believe that one cannot trade one off against the others.

There is a serious issue with end-to-end encryption. I do not know if the committee is aware of this but companies are all looking at implementing end-to-end encryption to protect privacy. That may unwittingly protect the perpetrators online. "Online trading" is a terrible term to use but online trading of child sexual abuse materials is a big business. I would like to see the platforms be able to do both. We landed a helicopter on Mars. Surely we can protect children at the same time as providing privacy.