Ms Elaine Crory:

I totally agree that the level of abuse minoritised people, including women, face is off the charts. Sometimes, talking about the constitutional future of this place, one way or the other, and that includes unionists, requires stepping a little outside your comfort zone. That is already bad enough without adding on top the abuse women get. Women politicians in Northern Ireland, women candidates who do not go on to be politicians because maybe they do not get elected, women speaking about politics generally, from journalists and commentators to members of the public who are more visible, and people in our own sector receive a shocking level of abuse. There are two MLAs in Northern Ireland to whom some things happened tin the run-up to the last assembly election. There were deepfakes of their faces inserted into pornographic videos. These are really shocking things. There have been some meetings and discussions in this regard. The PSNI and the Electoral Commission in the North are doing some work around helping candidates in the upcoming elections, which take place next week, on this issue. Ultimately, however, it comes down to what social media allows and encourages. That is a far bigger issue. We have a much more patriarchal society in the North than in the South, even though there is plenty of patriarchy present in the South and elsewhere. We have a further journey to make. Social media and the encouragement of anonymity or relative anonymity is genuinely opening the doors to some really ugly things.

Last year the Online Safety Act was passed in Westminster because control over media and social media is not devolved to Stormont. By the time it went from being a draft Bill to a Bill to an Act, it was already out of date because of the speed at which social media moves. This is not to criticise the nature of what people were trying to do. It also puts quite a burden on social media companies which, as we know, do as they wish. We have seen them sell our information and remove all kinds of community safety mechanisms that might have been in place under previous Administrations. Twitter, or X, has done this. It is effectively impossible to monitor in real time. Having better conversations about what is causing the escalation of abuse towards minority peoples would not be a solution but it would be a move in the right direction. All of this misogyny, ableism and racism festering under the surface of our society comes out online in its ugliest form but it is there all the time. What can we do about this? It is not an easy question to answer and it is years in the making.