Mr. Ciaran Moore:

We had focused on the section in the general scheme of the Bill in which reference is made to online harms and content that is there with the intention to promote suicide and self-harm. We felt this was the wrong approach. For a start, these are not illegal harms, so the question of intent should not really arise because that is an idea in criminal law. More significantly, however, the content quite often could be posted with good intentions. It is a question of how it is used and how the harm is created. We have a lot of experience of this and of testimonials and signage in specific places. We engage with communities on putting up appropriate signage and so on. We know that people quite often want to engage with content relating to suicide and want to put up helpful content, but they might say the wrong thing or put it in the wrong way. What we have is a set of guidelines on how to assess the harm and identify the impact on people. Quite often that impact is a question of how frequently people see the content. We believe it is not necessarily the case that one piece of content or one post in itself is always wrong but rather that there should be restrictions on how it is spread around in order that potentially harmful posts or content can be identified. That way, it stays within a friend circle and cannot be passed on further and a testimonial to a dead teenager or dead child can be there and be valued by that local community. We know there are pages which collect these testimonials. We would say, "Look at how impactful you would be if you were to consider this." We think that that secondary use of some of the content is important to avoid.