Ms Lee Carosi Dunn:

The Chair asked a question about the referendum. I can tell the committee that it was a difficult decision for the company. We were obviously very aware of the sensitivity around the referendum, once it was announced and had a cross-functional group meet regularly to review advertisements and our processes. These included employees from public policy, legal, trust and safety, who enforce our advertising policies. We have a large trust and safety presence in Dublin and in the lead-up to the referendum, these teams increased their vigilance across our products and platforms to ensure the advertisers were complying with their policies. We did not see any illegal activity on our platforms but we did see an increase in foreign spend closer to polling day and that we concluded that this increase gave rise to genuine public concern and showed the gap between the law and the public expectations and that is why we decided to pause the advertisements around the referendum. On the question asked as to whether this was successful, I do not know if that is the metric we would use. We did what we needed to do to ensure the safety of our platforms and users. As to what we will be doing next, we are looking at that right now. We understand there could be more referendums coming. There are obviously elections around the world. In the United States right now we are working to roll out some transparency tools and we are looking at how we can scale them internationally because we think they speak to a lot of the objectives of the Bill, such as verification of an advertiser, transparency on the advertisement of "paid for by", a transparency report that shows the spend of an advertiser and the dates of the advertisements and then a creative library that lists each of the advertisements. We think this will bring true transparency to political advertisements online, and be really good not only for users but for democracy. My colleague may wish to add to what I have said.