Mr. Dualta ? Broin:

I am head of public policy for Meta in Ireland. I have been invited to speak to the committee today about online safety,

online disinformation and media literacy. I will provide a brief overview of Meta’s approach to these topics. I look forward to the committee's questions.

On online safety, while Meta believes in freedom of expression, we also want our platforms, Facebook and Instagram, to be safe places where people do not have to see content meant to intimidate, exclude or silence them. We take a comprehensive approach to achieving this by writing clear policies - community standards in the case of Facebook and community guidelines in the case of Instagram - about what is and is not allowed on our platform; by developing sophisticated technology to detect and prevent abuse from happening in the first place; and by providing helpful tools and resources for people to control their experience or get help.

We regularly consult experts, advocates and communities around the world to write our rules and we constantly re-evaluate where we need to strengthen them. Our content enforcement relies on a combination of people reporting content, AI technology and human reviews. Our online and publicly accessible transparency centre contains quarterly reports on how we are faring in addressing harmful content on our platforms, in addition to a range of other data.

We welcome that Coimisiún na Meán has finally been established to implement the revised audiovisual media services directive. From early on, we have been supportive of the objectives of the DSA and the creation of a regulatory regime in Europe that minimises harm effectively, protects and empowers people, and upholds their fundamental rights. In August we published details of additional transparency measures and user options which are part of our ongoing commitment to meet our regulatory obligations.

We welcome the publication of the Digital Services Bill 2023 yesterday and we look forward to Ireland having this legislation and regulatory resources in place to meet its obligations under the DSA by the February 2024 deadline. Members will appreciate that as Facebook and Instagram are in the process of being designated for the purposes of the revised AVMSD by Coimisiún na Meán and are now subject to regulation under the DSA, I am somewhat limited in what I can discuss on those matters.

I turn to what the committee has called online disinformation. We have taken significant steps to fight the spread of misinformation using a three-part strategy to remove content that violates our community standards. In Ireland we removed almost 1,000 pieces of misinformation from Facebook for this reason in the first half of this year. We aim to reduce distribution of stories marked as false by third-party fact checkers, and inform people so they can decide what to read, trust and share. As part of that effort, in the European Union we partner with 26 fact-checking organisations covering 22 different languages in the EU. In Ireland, we work with TheJournal.ie. We add warning labels to posts it rates as false and notify the person who posted it, pointing them to the fact checker’s article debunking the claim. For the first six months of this year, these labels were applied to 1.1 million pieces of content on Facebook originating from Ireland. We also impose strict penalties on pages, groups, and Instagram and Facebook accounts which repeatedly share misinformation. This includes not recommending them to people and moving all of the content they share, regardless of whether it contains false claims, lower down the news feed so fewer people see it.