Mr. Simon Milner:

I thank the Chairman. It is a pleasure to be here. I am the policy director for Facebook in Ireland and the UK and my colleague, Ms Patricia Cartes, leads for us on safety throughout the region of Europe, the Middle East and Africa and she will take the members through a presentation around how we handle safety at Facebook.

I thought it might be useful to give members an introduction to Facebook. Facebook was created nine years ago with a mission, which remains as it is today, to make the world more open and connected. In practice, that means we provide a platform and a service via which people can connect with their friends, wherever they are in the world, for free and they can share with them what they are doing, where they are, photographs, passions and political interests. They can do all kinds of connecting with people they know and, indeed, people they do not know in that they may have a particular interest in certain public figures, bands or artists. We do this on a massive scale.

Facebook now has 1 billion active users, that is, 1 billion accounts. We do not allow people to have more than one account. Approximately, 5 billion actions are taken on Facebook every day. That can be a range of actions from liking something to posting to commenting on a post to posting a link. Most of that activity is entirely wholesome, innocuous and life-enhancing in many ways but some of it is not wholesome and some of it may be offensive and may actually be harmful. One of the things Ms Cartes will take members through is what happens in such situations, what tools we provide and how we handle those kinds of issues.

I also thought it would be worthwhile giving a sense of how Facebook happens. At the heart of Facebook is the Internet. That is how people use it; it is an Internet-based service and one has to be online in order to use Facebook. We are a technology company. That is at the heart of everything we do and we are always looking for innovations in the use of technology to enhance the experience of our users and that includes how we keep people safe, which Ms Cartes will explain shortly.

We are a company of around 5,000 people. At the moment, we have 400 in Dublin rising to 500 over the course of this year. Members may have seen a recent announcement about that. A good number of those people are involved in helping our users to use the platform effectively and to keep themselves safe. We also have standards; this is not a free for all. We have standards about what is and what is not acceptable on Facebook.

One thing I recognise - we find this in any audience we talk to about Facebook - is that there are varying levels of understanding about the platform, often based on how much people actually use it themselves. We have tried to minimise the jargon in this presentation and in what we say but if there are any issues which members think they do not quite understand and if we are using jargon that is not familiar to them, they should ensure they ask us because we want to ensure we illuminate their consideration of these important issues.