Ms Siobhán Cummiskey:

I thank Ms Niamh Sweeney for that and also the Chairman. As Ms Niamh Sweeney mentioned, I am the content policy manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Facebook based at our international headquarters in Dublin. It is my team, the content policy team, who write the rules that govern what people can and cannot share on Facebook. I have been working at Facebook for five years and prior to that I was a human rights lawyer and a solicitor here in Ireland and abroad.

More than 1 billion people worldwide come to Facebook every day to share and to connect. When one looks at that number across a month-long period, it jumps to 2 billion people. That translates into an incredible amount of content on our site. People come to Facebook to share and to connect and we know they will not do that if they do not feel safe. We write our community standards with the objective of allowing people to share and to connect while also keeping them safe online.

Our community standards are publicly available on our website and there is a link to our community standards in our written submission to the committee, and we would invite the committee members to read them. Our standards govern everything that we believe can compromise the safety of our community. That means that our community standards govern everything from bullying to hate speech to spam to pornography to graphic violence.

We know that this committee has a particular interest in our bullying policies and I would like to briefly speak to them. Our bullying policy states that you cannot shame or degrade a private person on our site. We have a specific section of our community standards that is entirely dedicated just to bullying. When it comes to public figures we allow more robust speech around public figures and matters of public interest. Having said that, we do not allow credible threats or hate speech against anyone who uses our platform.

We have a vast array of other policies that complement our bullying policy and I would like to speak for a moment to one of the most important of them and that is our authentic identity policy at Facebook. If one uses Facebook, one must do so using the name that one uses in real life. We find that makes people much more responsible and much more accountable for what they do online. When one has to put one's real name beside it, one tends to be much more careful in what one says and much more responsible when it comes to what one says.

We provide a host of other tools and resources that complement our policies. I would like to hand over to my colleague, Ms Julie de Bailliencourt who will speak to those.