What does Facebook do?

The social media giant has a set of community standards that include bullying and harassment. ‘‘We don’t tolerate bullying or harassment,’’ it claims in its short section on the issue.

It also says it will ‘‘allow you to speak freely on matters and people of public interest, but remove content that appears to purposefully target private individuals with the intention of degrading or shaming them’’.

Last week, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he wanted to have more than 20,000 staff working on security and content review, which would include bullying and harassment.

The network has its own bullying prevention hub, with information for teenagers, adults and educators. There is also advice for what to do if you have been accused of bullying and it encourages teens to report someone bullying, unfriend them or block them.

Facebook says: ‘‘Our global teams work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to review things you report and remove anything that violates our community standards. We don’t include any information about the person who filed the report when we reach out to the person responsible.’’

Couillault said Facebook had ‘‘always’’ been difficult to communicate with about issues like cyber bullying.

Its responses were appropriate, but took a long time.

However, the Harmful Digital Communications Act had made response times shorter.

‘‘It’s probably got more of a responsibility than it is taking. While it was not meant to be a place for harm to occur . . . harm is occurring.

‘‘Socially, you would say they have a responsibility.’’

Cocker said when creating a social media platform like Facebook there was a responsibility to abide by the laws of the country where it was based.

‘‘So obviously that’s interesting for social media companies because they serve the world via the internet from a location so the laws that govern them aren’t necessarily the laws that the people who use them are [under].

‘‘They have a responsibility to provide the service that they say they are going to provide. So if they set terms and conditions and rules and responsibilities for themselves then they have to meet those.

‘‘Facebook hasn’t always taken its responsibilities as seriously as we would like, but I think at the moment they are invested in combating bad behaviour on their platform.’’