Ms Niamh McDonald:

Absolutely. We feel they definitely have. We had signed up to code of content on countering illegal hate speech online. We made an agreement with the social media companies in December 2022 that they would engage with us to look at changes in patterns, that they would meet with us, that we would be able to report the content and that it would be taken down if it broke the social media community standards. Since November 2022, when this intensity really happened here, the response from all the social media companies, except TikTok, has been very lax. Sometimes it will be taken down. Much of the time, however, they tell us that it does not break their community standards.

We had a professional relationship with Twitter and good engagement with it, but there has been no engagement since the cutbacks and the arrival of the new ownership. We do not think that it is a good use of our time, strategically, to engage with Twitter. We feel it is better if we can go somewhere where that we can actually get the impact that we need.