Mr. David Miles:

It is a very good question. It is clearly a concern among society and among parents. I have been in the online safety space for approximately 20 years, since well before children were a dominant factor on the Internet. There is no question that the youth demographic has grown dramatically not just in Europe, but worldwide, so things need to change, which is only right. The first thing to say on the design of the products is that, if you look back to where they were eight to ten years ago, you will see that they were designed predominantly for adults. There has been a significant shift as that youth demographic has grown. I have been involved in NGOs, UNICEF and other environments in that kind of space and I know that a spectrum of harms has emerged that we have to deal with. There are some really important cognitive issues that need to be dealt with. We work really closely with experts, researchers and academics in this area and have done so for many years. I have worked with the UK Council for Internet Safety's evidence group for nearly ten years. We try to take a really evidence-based approach. In the last four years, I have implemented what are effectively codesign workshops with children and parents to look at how they are using the technology and to get their input and participation in how we design feeds and other functions. As a result, we have implemented close to 30 different tools and functions over the last two and a half years based on that. What was really interesting about getting young people involved is that there were some things we assumed would work well but which did not while there are others they really took on board, which has really informed how we have done things.

I refer to the take a break prompt, which is a really standard concept in terms of taking a break and being prompted to take a break after a certain amount of time. There is also quiet mode, which is shutting down from one's followers so that one can have a rest from that overnight and so on. Even with the parental supervision tools, we have worked with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Irish Data Protection Commissions' guidance on children's fundamentals to implement the best interests of the child framework, which puts the participation and the rights of young people into the design of those products. For example, if one implements a parental supervision tool on Quest or on Instagram, both the child and the parent opt into that and it is a teachable moment there when they can talk about that. It is about features and functions like that.

I will give a final example. Last week we announced an on-device nudity filter, which will effectively put an interstitial over every single nude image and will warn anybody sending an image that they need to think about what they are sending. That is a really big move for us globally. We believe it will deal with a lot of issues in schools around unsolicited images. It also complements our strategy around StopNCII, Stop Non-Consensual Intimate Image Abuse, which is about women's safety, to take it down. We are working with the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, NCMEC on this. It actually allows us to hash images and get them sent to NCMEC or to a women's safety organisation to try to have that content taken down. The technology we use is multi-platform so we just open source that to other platforms so the content can get taken down across multiple platforms.

We as a business are evolving very quickly. The committee's concerns are justified. In areas like suicide and self-harm we rely on an expert committee of more than 27 experts in that area to guide us on getting those controls right. In January, as a result of their advice, we no longer show any suicide, self-harm or eating disorder content really in any form through recommender systems, reels and stories. We have made a dramatic move in that area to cut that back with the guidance of experts to make sure that youngsters are not cognitively affected but also that they can signpost to our many partners and experts to get the assistance they need.

The nature of social media has changed in the past ten years and I feel we are responding to that. We will always need to do more because it is a fast-moving space. I thank the Senator for the question.