Ms Niamh McDade:

I thank the Senator for the question. It is such an important topic. To clarify, X prohibits any content that promotes or encourages suicide, self-harm and eating disorders in addition to that. It is a clear violation of our rules and policies. We respond to user reports on that and and we also remove content on a proactive basis via our safety team if they see that content. As an addition, we partnered in the past with different organisations to trigger a prompt to appear when a person searches for key terms associated with suicide and self-injury and lots of different terms in that space, for example. That is a key intervention point where we will direct users in Ireland, for example, to the Samaritans to provide them with help and support. We have that step in place as well, but it is a clear violation of our rules and policies.

To give some figures on that, in 2023 more than 900,000 posts and 8,000 accounts were removed for violating our policy around promoting suicide and self-harm. Those are some useful figures there as well. We also recognise there are communities on the platform that support people, such as those who are recovering from an eating disorder or engaging in conversations around suicide and difficult conversations there. Some of that conversation can be helpful to individuals. We are careful to protect some of those conversations but we prohibit any content that would encourage that. It is a careful balance and that is why our content moderation team and safety team are geared towards striving to have balance between essentially removing violative content, but allowing conversation to happen on that basis as well.