Dr. Pierre François Docquir:

I thank the Chairman very much. I thank the Deputy for the questions.

In terms of the appointment mechanism, the social media council is a multi-stakeholder mechanism. We suggest that the different categories of stakeholders, by which we mean social media platforms, media companies, the advertising industry, academia and civil society organisations representing the diversity of society, should appoint one member each or two members for some of these categories. This is detailed in our written submission. In addition, then, a number of independent directors and members would be chosen by the first set of directors. This is from conversations we have had so far with our interlocutors in Ireland. This seems to be a governance structure that makes sense for the people with whom we have been speaking.

In terms of the role of the social media council for the appeals mechanism and how it would impact content moderation decisions, we suggest there should first be an attempt to deal with the problem internally with the company whose platform is concerned with the content moderation dispute and then the case, if not solved internally, could be brought to the social media council.

The social media council would have the capacity to choose the cases it wants to focus on to avoid being drowned in too many cases. On the other hand, however, every person should also have the possibility to send their requests. A filtering mechanism will, therefore, be fine-tuned in the constitution of the social media council.

The decisions of the council will not be based on companies' terms of service or community standards. They will be based on international standards on human rights, which is where the protection of freedom of expression and other fundamental rights come into play. The decisions of the social media council would be binding for the companies within the framework of a voluntary compliance mechanism, of course. Nonetheless, companies that take part in the mechanism would commit to executing the decisions of the social media council. That is how we suggest things could work and then reach a result that would combine the protection of fundamental rights with an effective regulation of problematic content.