Professor James O'Higgins Norman:

In our opening statement, we note that there is a need for us to recognise that issues of bullying and cyberbullying exist within our community, as do schools, and in the past we tended to see these as problems that schools had to address on their own. We typically talked about whole-school approaches to tackling bullying and cyberbullying. However, now we are looking at a different type of world, a much more joined-up world, both online and offline. The idea that a school would be left to deal with an issue like bullying or cyberbullying on its own would not work. We suggest there is a role for the school, as part of the wider education system and societal system, to be connected in some way with the online safety commissioner or directly with social media companies or gaming companies, which might have a facility to report negative and abusive content that is not picked up by AI. For example, one suggestion we make is that there be a trusted person in each school to whom children or parents could report if they are concerned about something going on in the school that has made its way online, and there would be a speedy communication line directly to someone who could do something about it, whether that be in the social media company, the gaming platform or at a regulatory level with respect to the online safety commissioner. There needs to be a formal structure in place for that.

We know AI is working to a certain extent when it is used by social media and gaming platforms but we do not have a full picture of how well it is working. Many of the metrics are collected internally by the private companies and access to those is quite limited from a research point of view. We are flagging that the more information we have, the more we will be able to decide in wider society how effective these AI methods are.