Ms Niamh Sweeney:

There are two types of fake account problem. There is the one that Mr. Kaplan has just described, the kind of activity we discovered subsequent to the 2016 US Presidential election, which is usually one person or a number of people creating a series of fake accounts that all operate in tandem. The way our technology works in identifying those is that usually, they are created and deployed at the same time and spread the same information at almost exactly the same time. Those kinds of signals and triggers allow us to detect them. Often, using those bots is how people spread misinformation at scale.

Let me stress that not all bots are bad. Other cases were highlighted and Senator O'Reilly mentioned that he had been a victim of a fake account. One must be who one says one is on Facebook. We have an authentic identification policy, it means that one must go by the name that one's friends and family recognise as you. We rely in large part on people reporting to us when people do not adhere to that. Sometimes it is really obvious and one would know that the name is not real. In other cases it may be that they have set up an account for trolling purposes. If that is reported to us we can detect it. I stress we do not always get it right.

There are also impersonating accounts, I know that sometimes that can affect public figures, whereby somebody purports to be that person online. If that is reported to us we can detect it pretty quickly and we know that Deputy Timmy Dooley is Timmy Dooley and there is only one Deputy Timmy Dooley. Equally, the commissioner, Ms Dixon, referred to facial recognition, which is a technology we do not currently use in Europe. I think most people would be aware that under GDPR, people would be given a choice as to whether they want to opt in, so as Deputy Dooley said, it is very much on an opt-in basis and again that is a very effective security tool for people. If one opts in, any time a photograph in which one is included is uploaded on to the platform, one is alerted to that fact. I think that will do a lot for those who decide to opt in. Other people will not be comfortable with the technology used in order to make that service available. As we are dealing with those two problems in tandem, we rely a great deal on user reports. If one is operating a page, the administrator of that page must be a real account, that is, a real person who is the person he or she says he or she is. We are conscious of that as well in the context of the referendum. While Deputy Lawless rightly points that there is an absence of applicable law when it comes to campaigning in the online space, we are conscious of how sensitive this is for people and have been thinking about it for a long time. We have met personnel from the Transparent Referendum Initiative, TRI, and I wish to acknowledge Ms Liz Carolan, who is present today. We welcome what they are doing. Anything that brings greater transparency to this process is a good thing. We have not been able to address all of their concerns - and I admit that upfront - but what we have done is to try to open up a dedicated channel of communications so that if there is anything that is surfaced to them or they encounter, they can surface it to us and we take a wider look at those issues when they are surfaced to us. Consequently, they might come to us with one issue but we take a look at a page in the round to make sure that its administrators are legitimate actors on the platform.

It is worth spelling out what the "view ads" tool is and what it is not. We understand that a number of issues need to be addressed with our political transparency tools for advertisements. As Mr. Kaplan outlined, "view ads" is the very first step in a series of steps to bring greater transparency to online advertisements. To explain, if one is served an advertisement or if one goes to a page, one will be able to click on the tool and see all the advertisements which that particular advertiser is running at that moment in one's jurisdiction. If a particular campaign group is running an advertisement in Ireland, one will be able to click on it and see all the advertisements it is running at that particular time. What that is supposed to address is the issue of micro-targeting or so-called dark advertisements, whereby I am being targeted because I am a woman in my 30s who is from an urban area while somebody else is being targeted because he is a man in his 60s and is from a rural area. One is trying to target people with different messaging. It is supposed to bring greater transparency to that. We hope it will. Of course, it does not address all of the concerns that people have.

The other things we have announced will take time to build and roll out. I acknowledge that it is not of any great comfort to people when I say it takes time to build them and roll them out but unfortunately, that is where we find ourselves. One such measure is that one will need to say who has paid for an advertisement. We need to build the functionality for people to be able to build that into their political advertisements. Another is that one will need to verify who one is as a political advertiser whereby if one is running political or issues-based advertisements of national significance, one will need to be verified. That is quite tricky to deploy and it will have to be different in every country because there will be different systems and different vendors in place. The other element is slipping my mind at this exact moment in time.

We are rolling out these systems over time. This is the first one, as Mr. Kaplan said, and we are adding Ireland to the pilot on 25 April. Obviously that will be with a four-week run into the referendum but there are other things we still need to do and we are working on them.