Meta, Google, and TikTok defend their response to Dublin riots

TikTok Ireland's head of public policy Susan Moss said the company was “absolutely confident” in how it had responded to the riots, which saw vehicles set on fire and widespread looting on November 23.

Social media companies operating in Ireland say they responded proactively to the aftermath of the stabbing of several children in Dublin last month, contacting gardaí and combating misinformation on their platforms in real time.

Appearing before the Oireachtas Media Committee, representatives of TikTok, Google, and Meta, the parent compnay of Facebook and Instagram, outlined how they had responded to the stabbings, an event which preceded the worst riots seen in Dublin in living memory later that evening.

Meta Ireland’s head of public policy Dualta O’Broin said that once the company noted the initial media reports concerning the stabbing of three children outside a gaelscoil in Dublin’s inner city, its law enforcement division had made contact with An Garda Síochána and had maintained that contact over the course of the day, although at that point “the discussion wouldn’t have been about removing content” but rather “the purpose was to establish what had happened”.

TikTok Ireland's head of public policy Susan Moss said that the company was “absolutely confident” in how it had responded to the riots, which saw vehicles set on fire and widespread looting across the north inner city on November 23.

She said that the company had been able “to get ahead of content” by activating its crisis management protocols to remove any such content which violated its standards, and had likewise “worked both closely and proactively with An Garda Síochána”.

Ms Moss added that TikTok had “scaled up” its fact-checking teams on the day, who proceeded to flag content “not just on TikTok but across the internet”.

Google’s head of public policy Ryan Meade meanwhile said that both the stabbings and the riots “would have triggered our instant protocols”, which would have led to full-time monitoring of the situation by the company, which also owns YouTube. He added however, that “I don’t think we saw any threat to life”.

The committee meanwhile heard criticism of X, formerly Twitter, which had faced accusations of not having removed harmful posts relating to the riots at the request of gardaí — claims it has since refuted — and which had declined to attend the hearing due to “ongoing legal proceedings”.

Fianna Fáil’s Christopher O’Sullivan labelled the company’s non-attendance “a disgrace”, while Fine Gael’s Ciaran Cannon said that X’s owner Elon Musk “should be deeply ashamed of himself” for his own incendiary interventions into discussions around the riots.

Regarding the suggestion that social media companies promote hateful content as ‘any engagement is good’, Mr O’Broin said the assertion “couldn’t be further from the truth”, adding that Meta’s business is advert-based, and that corporate brands “don’t like” being placed adjacent to hateful postings.

He did acknowledge however that if inflammatory content is sent via encrypted messaging site Whatsapp, also owned by Meta, and that content is not reported by a user, then “there’s nothing we can do”.