Professor Barry O'Sullivan:

There have been some fantastic remarks. In the context of cognitive security and what is being sold, attention is certainly being sold but what is more concerning is that self-esteem is being outsourced. The sense that an individual has self-worth is measured by the number of interactions, followers, likes and so on, and that is really problematic. It is a sort of quantification of development and it is a way of incentivising development in a certain way that might not necessarily be in people’s best interests. I share the Senator's concerns about what I call Mark Zuckerberg’s "sorry about that, folks" moment, which was extraordinary. A technology has been responsible for killing people and the company has effectively just said it was sorry about that. That that might be acceptable in some sense is just astonishing.

Some things can be easily done. The concept of trolling applies both to children and to public representatives, but it is not a difficult problem to get rid of trolls-----