Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:

I thank the committee for inviting us to appear. I am head of public policy for Facebook Ireland and I am joined by Ms Claire Rush, our lead counsel on content and regulatory matters. We are based at Facebook's international headquarters in Dublin.

We recognise the real concerns of citizens and Oireachtas Members regarding the fast-moving and evolving nature of harmful content on the Internet, including on our platform. We take our role in keeping harmful content off our services very seriously. We recognise that if society were designing the Internet as it exists today from scratch, it would not ask companies to make the judgments that Facebook must make in regard to harmful content alone. We, therefore, welcome the fact that governments and policy makers around the world are taking an active role in addressing harmful online content. It is with their help, including that of the committee, that the rules which govern the Internet can be updated in a way that allows people the freedom to express themselves and allows entrepreneurs to build things, while also protecting society from broader harms.

Our community standards are the rules which govern what is allowed on our platform. We draft and update these rules in consultation with a wide range of experts, including NGOs and academics from around the world, including Ireland. They cover a wide range of content issues including hate speech, bullying, harassment, graphic violence and nudity. In many cases, our community standards go further than national laws, such as, for example, in the area of non-consensual intimate images, NCII. We have zero tolerance for the sharing of NCII on our platforms. Once we are made aware of these images, we remove them and use media-matching technology to prevent further sharing or re-uploading of the images. However, decisions about content can be complex and we do not always get it right. That is why we are establishing an external oversight board which will adjudicate at a global level on decisions we make on content. The decision of the oversight board will be binding on the company.

We submitted a detailed response to the consultation convened by the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Bruton, earlier this year. In the interest of informing this discussion, I will summarise two of its points. We outlined how, in our view, an effective and efficient system of oversight by a regulator might operate. On the subject of notice and take-down, we recognised there can be a role for a regulator to review certain incidents where content is first reported to a service provider but not removed. We look forward to the publication of the related Bill and to engaging in future consultation opportunities.

Every piece of content on Facebook, including photos, text posts, comments, profiles and pages can be reported to us for violating our content policies. In each case, one can report the content by clicking on the link in the top right hand corner or, in the case of a comment, by pressing one's thumb on the comment for a few seconds if using a mobile phone.

If the content is found to be against our community standards, it is removed. We are also investing heavily in artificial intelligence, AI, so that we can more rapidly detect harmful and illegal content on our platforms, and it has been very successful in certain areas. However there are types of content which are more challenging for Al, such as bullying and harassment where context can be important. This is why we depend on reports from our community of users.

Our most recent community standards enforcement report, in which we publish quarterly breakdowns of the content that we have removed, demonstrates the efforts we are making to tackle a range of illegal and legal but harmful forms of content. For example, in the first quarter of this year we removed 5.4 million pieces of child sexual abuse material globally, 99.2% of which we removed before it was reported to us. The report also demonstrates the improvements we are making in developing Al tools to deal with challenging areas of harmful content such as hate speech, where our proactive detection rates have increased from 38% in the first quarter of 2018 to 65.4% a year later.

Our community standards recognise that bullying and harassment take place in many different places and can have many different forms. We do not tolerate this type of behaviour as it prevents people from feeling safe and respected on Facebook. In addition to removing content, we give users tools to help them protect themselves against bullying, such as blocking other users and controlling who sees your posts, and we operate a bullying prevention hub which gives young people, parents and teachers the tools and resources to address the complex issues which bullying presents.

In Ireland, we work with experts to inform our safety policies and deliver online safety programmes. In the past 12 months we have invested €1 million in a partnership with the national anti-bullying research and resource centre in DCU and SpunOut.ie. The main goal of this partnership is to help raise awareness of online safety and tackle the issue of online bullying among young people by offering online safety and anti-bullying training to every secondary school in Ireland. The programme is under way with more than 100 teachers from schools across Ireland attending the first set of training sessions in September. In addition, the research carried out through the school's training programme will inform SpunOut.ie's online safety resources for teenagers.

I hope that this gives committee members a brief overview of the steps we are taking to address harmful content on our platform. We have put these measures and more in place because we want users to feel safe and secure when they are using our services. Claire and I look forward to your questions and we would be happy to follow up in writing on any point which is of interest to the committee members.