Dr. Johnny Ryan:

It is useful to distinguish in our minds between the medium that we are talking about now and what we used to, or still, have. Once upon a time, I worked for a newspaper in this country. There are illegal things one can publish. We have got quite a lot of content law and plenty of things are illegal. If I published something illegal and Sean Sherlock was my editor, you would phone him up because I had written it about you and say, "I am going to sue you." Sean Sherlock would ding his employee and the content would be removed. That is how we have been. The verb that mattered was "publish". The problem now is that you have got millions of people and they are all publishing all the time, and if I put up a post on social media, no one is going to notice it because, for a start, I am wearing all my clothes so I am immediately less interesting than my competitors. When someone walks in to a building and sprays machine-gun fire and videotapes that, as we had in Christchurch, you do not necessarily know for sure that that is going to be of interest to people unless you are a system that is checking the content, seeing who that might tickle, artificially pulling it out and amplifying it by pushing it into everyone's feeds. The verb that matters, in this problem, is not as much "publish" - it is like a tree falling in the wood when no one is there to hear it because no one might see the content. It is that it is artificially selected and amplified. It is "amplification".

On the question of best practice in dealing with amplification, we are best practice. We just do not practise it. We have got the GDPR that solves a lot of these problems, if enforced, and we have got the AVMSD, which I referred to before. We have got the DBC and we have got Coimisiún na Meán. The international best practice we should be thinking about is the change we have had in the last three-to-four years at the US Department of Justice and in the USFTC. If we had a similar change here, a real culture of enforcement, of dedicated investigation and of people who are willing to actually do the work of taking a scalp, we would be best practice because we have the law.