Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 6 December 2023

Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport And Media

Online Safety, Online Disinformation and Media Literacy: Discussion

Mr. Ryan Meade:

What I would say in respect of the day of the incidents is that we took a number of proactive steps on becoming aware of them; the first incident obviously being the very distressing stabbing and then the subsequent unrest in Dublin. Both of those triggered our instant protocols where we undertook 24-7 monitoring to see were these incidents going to trigger material that would be in violation of our policies, either because of incitement to hatred or dangerous disinformation. On the first day, we did not see our platforms being used in respect of those events, although our teams were monitoring it. Other proactive steps taken were looking down reviews and edits in Google Maps around the site of the incident. We have invested in these instant protocols and policies around enforcement and they kicked in very quickly. We subsequently had a number of useful discussions with Coimisiún na Meán just to share information on the steps we were taking and we continued to monitor through the weekend. In general, we did not see material that would have triggered, for example, a notification of threat to life or limb, for people using our platforms.

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