Mr. Ronan Costello:

That is no problem. I am happy to jump in there. I will first address the questions that were directed at us regarding pseudonymity and such. The key issue here is that pseudonymity is often conflated with abuse. It is not a precursor or a prerequisite to people being abusive online. From a Twitter point of view, more specifically, it is not a shield against our rules. For the purpose of enforcing our policies, Twitter's approach to real name accounts and pseudonymous accounts is exactly the same. A violation is a violation, no matter the account's identity.

As I mentioned previously, which addresses the Senator's earlier point about people having multiple accounts, which may be engaging in abusive behaviour, our focus is on how the account is behaving, not on the identity the account may have, although that is a data point we can take into consideration. The Senator mentioned, for example, that we can identify one account, which is reported to us by a user or by a trusted partner or non-profit organisation, and then detect if it is connected to several others. That would be a violation of our multi-account abuse policy.

The key point here is that pseudonymity is not a shield against our rules. It does not protect someone from the enforcement mechanisms we have because the enforcement mechanisms are so focused on how accounts behave rather than how they appear.