Mr. Ciarán O'Connor:

I will comment on the recommender and the trust and safety systems, but also wider teams on social media platforms. There is an infamous example. In the lead-up to the 2020 US election, Facebook enacted what it called news ecosystem quality scores. This was essentially a break-glass measure where they put more weight on their algorithms to offer up more content from reputable news organisations to users. They turned it off not long after the election, but one of the findings was that because of these changes to the algorithm people were spending less time online. That was a fundamental issue for social media platforms. The implementation of these guidelines has never been shared, which comes back to an issue of transparency with platforms, their awareness internally, and their potential culpability of knowing how these algorithms are helping to promote and expose people to potentially harmful, hateful and false content online.