Dr. Monika Bickert:

There is much to address in this question.

We think, however, that it is very important to maintain open access for the public to Facebook. We have a team devoted to cybersecurity and that includes preventing hacking and cyberattacks, perhaps of the sort mentioned. We also focus on disrupting what we call "co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour". These are networks of accounts, sometimes state-run and sometimes not, trying to abuse our platform to share things such as divisive messaging, political messaging or intimidation. We have a team focused on identifying and removing those instances. It is not something we can do alone, so we partner closely with researchers, academics, security firms and others in the industry.

Sometimes we will get a lead from somebody else, we will do the investigation and then we will remove that network. When we do that, we are transparent about it and in our newsroom, we publish blog posts about the actions we have taken. That has been a major area of investment for us. Going after fake accounts has also been an important part of disrupting bad activity that may, or may not, again come from state actors. Our automated tools have got so much better that in the first quarter of 2019, we removed more than 2 billion fake accounts. Not all of those were designed to share disinformation but we were removing the vast majority of these accounts within moments of their creation. These are definitely areas of interest for us. We believe people should have access to Facebook.