Malcolm Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses. I will preface my remarks by saying that social media companies can be a force for good. We were able to see much of that during the course of the pandemic. Today, however, we are primarily focusing on the question of online safety and how we combat online harm.

I agree with Mr. Costello that we need to ensure democratic values are built into the Internet and into online expression and that we should not, in most instances, seek to curb freedom of expression. Part of our responsibility is that with freedom of expression comes responsibility, however. In the first instance, our role as legislators is to protect our citizens and those resident here in the online public space and, indeed, cyberspace. I hope the witnesses would want to do that.

I will follow up on Deputy Mythen's question in order that we can get an idea of the scale of the challenge. I have a number of questions and I will put them all together. In the context of 2020, perhaps each of the witnesses might identify the number of individual complaints their companies received in Ireland, that is, complaints from individuals about content, and then the number of profiles they removed as a consequence. I do not want percentages, I would prefer numbers.

I was conscious of Mr. Ó Broin's point, as covered in the media this morning, around delays to the legislation and addressing the importance of the online safety commissioner. From a Fianna Fáil point of view, we are talking about asking the Minister to establish the office of the online safety commissioner immediately on a non-statutory basis. In other words, that office would acquire powers as time passes. Specifically, if we establish the office of the online safety commissioner on a non-statutory basis here, would each of the companies fully co-operate with it?

I will turn to the question of anonymous accounts and bots, which is obviously an area of concern, and the question of ensuring that individuals are able to identify themselves. This is in reference to digital identifiers. Down the line, we may be able to use blockchain and so on to do this. I refer, however, to using a system whereby somebody must prove his or her identify either directly to the companies or through a digital intermediary.

Mr. Costello might tackle my final question on the challenge around multiple accounts because it is more directed at Twitter. He spoke about using machine learning and so forth, which is very important. In a situation where, for instance, an individual is operating nine Twitter accounts or if some individual seems to be linked to multiple accounts, perhaps coming from outside the State from somewhere like Belgrade, for example, do alarm bells sound in Twitter? Most of us might operate our own Twitter account and possibly a business account or one or two others. I do not know how some people have time to operate multiple accounts. Surely, there is a system of alarms whereby Twitter would immediately look into tackling a situation like that.