Ms Niamh McDonald:

To get a little more into the weeds of things, a number of things have happened over recent years that have increased hate and disinformation online. One of the big things are the cuts to trust and safety teams within platforms. They are the moderators of content. They are humans who are moderating content. We are now seeing a shift towards computerised content takedown. A range of platforms have sacked between 25% and 85% of their trust and safety teams and have directed all these resources towards automated decision-making tools. We see that as a big issue because we have to understand the localised context in which everybody works. We had local and European elections. The ISD spoke about the rate of disinformation around that, which we also monitored. There was also the lead-up to the riots in Coolock and Dublin city centre. If we do not have that human context moderating the platforms, we do not have trust or do not understand how the content is being taken down. We see that TikTok announced last week that it will cut 25% of its employees who are moderating in its trust and safety teams in the UK. Twitter has cut its teams by 43%, Google has cut them by one third and Meta, in 2022, removed more than 200 content moderators. When platforms say they are being moderated within their rules, we are not sure how that is happening. There is no transparency.

To reinforce what Ms McGinley said, in January and March of this year, the platforms X and Meta got private sessions here. This was post the riots, post the violence and post the impact there has been on communities. I lead the community engagement programme in the Hope and Courage Collective. I work with fabulous communities throughout the country who are trying to make their communities resilient and communities of welcome, but they have this onslaught of consistent disinformation from international companies. That is generating fear. The vast majority of people throughout the country are welcoming, engaging and democratic. They want to have the best for their communities but there is no oversight of accountability regarding social media platforms. That is what we are up against.