Ms Siobhán Cummiskey:

People who are part of public life are public figures, for instance. People who are very frequently mentioned in the press are public figures. Those people do not receive the full protection of our bullying policy. The reason we do not give the full protection of our bullying policy is because our bullying policy is so expansive that if we were to give that protection, it would not be possible to make a meme about the president or prime minister of a country. One would not be able to engage in the type of freedom of expression we see commonly in the newspaper with caricatures around people in public life. Having said that, we have a very hard line on things like hate speech. People are protected from hate speech no matter whether they are the president of a country or prime minister or an ordinary person. However, we draw a distinction between children and people who are private and people who are public. Credible threats are another example of something that is not permitted against anyone on our platform because they are dangerous.

We have thousands of people who are based all around the world reviewing content. They operate on a follow-the-sun model which is to say the reporting system operates 24-7. We hire native speakers in order that they understand the context of the relevant country and the reports they are receiving and they respond to most reports within approximately 24 hours. Last May, we announced that we would double our operations team, a huge number of the members of which are based in Dublin. We doubled the number from 4,500 to approximately 9,000 at the end of this year. We are also set to add thousands of more reviewers in 2018 because we take this issue very seriously and we want to get to these reports very quickly.

I was asked about the issue of people sharing fighting videos. If someone shares a video of a fight and people underneath are leaving comments, and this may be something one sees in comments rather than in the video itself, mocking the person or degrading them, we would remove that. The Chairman asked if we profiled the people who might be more likely to do it.