Ms Susan Moss:

I will briefly take the committee through the steps we took that day. We do not permit misleading or false information on TikTok, especially harmful misinformation that causes significant harm both to society and to individuals. We were absolutely confident in our response on that day. We were able to get ahead of content and events as they were unfolding. The first thing we did was to activate our crisis management protocols to both remove violated content and to prevent the spread of misinformation or disinformation on the platform. We then worked closely and proactively with An Garda Síochána to support it, and in addition to that, and more to the Deputy's question around disinformation, we scaled up our external fact-checking organisation. We have 15 external fact-checking organisations. They are IFCN-accredited. We activated our emergency fact-checking procedure in collaboration with those fact-checkers. We have a fact-checking organisation here in Ireland and it was flagging content not just on TikTok but horizon scanning across the Internet and flagging to us these individual claims it was seeing. That then helped us to prevent that type of content spreading on TikTok. Just to give an idea of what we were seeing, we saw 25 individual claims. That is not 25 posts; that is 25 individual stories. For example, one of them would have been that the military was moving into O'Connell Street. We were able to fact-check that and determine it was inaccurate. Then, what we do while content is being fact-checked is that with an abundance of caution, we will remove that content from being recommended to our community. When it is fact-checked, we will either remove it, or if we cannot verify a claim, we will then label that content to make our audience aware that this content contains information that has not been verified. It is very fast-moving. It really was a confident response from TikTok in this instance.