Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Facebook is the largest of these platforms, and the one where most of the violence, and, indeed, disturbing content, is shared. The content moderators in Dublin have been outsourced. This is despite the fact that their work is essential. It is deemed essential by Facebook. It has to carry on and as the Tánaiste stated, artificial intelligence will only do so much. It will not do the job of these people.

Facebook has outsourced its responsibility in some respects. According to an article in The Sunday Business Post, a worker said that he could not even tell his family what he was doing. There is a huge amount of secrecy around this and a huge amount of what I would consider skating up to the very edge of what is acceptable industrial relations practices.

The workers and many of their representatives believe Facebook is aware that the jobs that it is asking these people to do are causing them this level of psychological damage up to and including post-traumatic stress disorder and that is why the company has outsourced it. There is a job here for us, not only to talk about it but to engage with those workers because this is a new form of work. This is not the type of work that was done when I was younger or, indeed, when the Minister was younger. This is very new. We need to inform ourselves. I ask that the Tánaiste makes time to meet these workers or their representatives to hear at first hand what they are going through.

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