Ms Cori Crider:

I will readily concede that I am an American lawyer and not an Irish lawyer. It is an interesting idea into which we will now look urgently. God knows the subject access requests do not come back in a full way. It seems obvious from a common sense way that a company should not be able to hold people to agreements they are not given copies of in a systematic way. There is a wider cultural issue of how often this is repeated with periodic retraining or refreshers, with constant messages from management. It is almost Pavlovian conditioning about this question of secrecy.

The Senator had other questions about TikTok and YouTube. TikTok is the company that Ms Plunkett was referring to when she said people were leaving in droves to work for it because it is offering direct employment contracts. A newer kind of upstart social media firm has decided to employ people directly.

Everybody knows YouTube is one of Google's companies and it operates the same outsourcing model as Facebook. The outsourcing companies in Ireland do similar work for YouTube and the Senator is exactly right in that this raises the same questions relating to exposure to toxic content and precarity that Facebook puts people through. It is another matter calling out for a regulatory response because we want a consistent standard to be applied across all these platforms that really are the public square these days.

This relates to the Senator's final question, which is how to regulate this appropriately and what needs to be put in the Statute Book. With humility, I again say I am not a legislative draftsperson. It seems, nonetheless, that this is an appropriate subject of health and safety regulation and questions such as limits on toxic content are appropriate to regulator.

There is also the question of outsourcing a core business function. One does not need a particular ideological position about the wisdom or lack of wisdom of outsourcing in general. This is a special case and it is about outsourcing a business function that is core to the health of the public square. Stepping back for a moment, we are now more than 15 years into this experiment with social media and light-touch or no regulation has failed. It has hurt workers and led to a public square that is really pretty problematic in many ways. It ought to be regulated just like other forms of mass communication, such as broadcasting, both for workers and the health of the public square.