Ms Sabine Frank:

I am happy to add to what my colleague has said and outline what we do at European level to reflect how we do this. We have dedicated persons who speak almost all languages. This reflects the fact that in videos we have different languages and need to understand what people are saying. We also need to take the context into account because context is key if we are to police videos against our community guidelines. The committee should rest assured that we make sure we have all the knowledge we need to do this work in a proper and meaningful way.

We put a lot of emphasis on education because we believe mobbing and bullying are phenomena in the offline world just as they are in the online world. It is important that we educate teachers and equip parents and students in their early years with the proper tools. We are all educated to read books critically and carefully and understand the context in books, but we are not well equipped to do the same in the online world. This is where we can see we have a role we can play and co-operate and have many partnerships with experts in this area. My colleague mentioned peer-to-peer projects. We have similar projects in different countries and would love to explore with the committee whether we could so something similar in Ireland. Our experience is that teenagers take it much more seriously if people of the same age educate them and it is much easier for them to turn to them if they have a question or problem. It is also about having a level of trust. They trust their own peer group more than older people. That is why we have invested in many partnerships moving in this direction.

Parents obviously have an important role to play and should equip their children with all the tools they need. We have dedicated special resources on our platforms directed at parents to give them a better understanding. They outline the background to cyber bullying, to whom parents can turn, what they can do and how to spot the first signs and reactions if their children are being bullied.

It is important that parents take quick action in this regard when it comes to their attention. Alongside this, we have significant information about safety tools parents can use on our platforms.

The YouTube curriculum was developed in Ireland and we are happy we can export it to many other European countries. I come from Germany, where we have introduced this education package to relevant institutions and they like it very much. We try to use the experience we take from one country such as Israel or Germany and import it to Ireland and vice versa. YouTube is also a member of Teachtoday, a cross-industry and cross-NGO initiative which equips teachers with safety resources they can implement in their schools to address issues such as online reputation, cyberbullying and what one does to grow up. We believe education is the key, not only media literacy.