Ms Cori Crider:

Perhaps Ms Ní Bhrógáin could talk about what people could collectively do, but I can speak a little on the question of what Facebook is doing. The work Ms Plunkett described is essentially Facebook's response. Some stuff will be caught algorithmically such as spam or some kind of hate speech, but one of the things we observed over the course of the pandemic is that during the first wave when Ms Plunkett and her colleagues were sent home, there was apparently an experiment in much more automated content moderation. They turned the knob up to 11, as it were, and tried to see what would happen if the algorithm as they have it was allowed to catch more content in order, as I understand it, to stop moderators working from home having to see so much graphic stuff while they were at home. That experiment appears to have failed. There was some good investigative reporting about it last year that showed, for example, that self-harm content stayed up and was not caught by the algorithm and that other problematic content stayed up as the algorithm just could not catch it but pretty anodyne stuff that should have stayed on the platform came down. It shows that we are a very long way from this job going away. It is absolutely essential if we are going to have a contemporary public square then what Ms Plunkett does has to be a part of it, but as we said, at the moment, the work is treated as disposable. I would like to hear from Ms Ní Bhrógáin and Ms Plunkett on the question of what people can do by coming together because we have been trying to support people to come together but the obstacles are considerable.