Ms Niamh Sweeney:

I thank all the members of the committee for inviting us here today to talk about this very important topic. As the Chairman said, I am the head of public policy for Facebook Ireland. I am joined by my colleagues Ms Siobhán Cummiskey, who leads our Dublin-based content policy team, and by Ms Julie de Baillliencourt, who is our head of safety policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

We welcome this opportunity to explain our tools, policies, extensive reporting infrastructure and general approach to keeping young people safe. We are always keen to hear feedback about any issues the members have had with Facebook because we always want to do better. This is a learning opportunity for us as well.

Myself, Ms Siobhán Cummiskey and Ms Julie de Bailliencourt are all based in Facebook's international headquarters at Grand Canal Square in Dublin where we work alongside more than 2,200 other colleagues, several hundred of whom are focused on the security and safety of our users through their work. We have grown from just 30 staff when we first set up an Irish office in 2009 and our physical footprint in Ireland now extends to four locations, including our state-of-the-art data centre, which will soon start serving traffic in Clonee in County Meath, and our Oculus virtual reality research office in County Cork.

We have watched this committee's hearings on cybersecurity as it relates to children with great interest, particularly as we have good active relationships with many of the experts the committee has heard from on this topic. Most notably, we have a strong relationship with An Garda Síochána, particularly the cyber crime and the domestic violence and sexual assault investigation units which handle child safety. For several years we have worked with a designated contact within Garda Headquarters in the Phoenix Park. All requests relating to Facebook from around Ireland are channelled through this team which has allowed us to respond efficiently and effectively to those requests.

We have a dedicated team, again based out of our Dublin office, that handles these requests and they prioritise safety issue. They respond out of hours to situations involving real world harm and they proactively flag cases of child exploitation to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, also known as NCMEC, which liaises directly with the Garda.

We are also involved in all the European Commission's self-regulatory initiatives referenced by Professor Brian O'Neill during his recent contribution to the committee and have worked with him on this and other issues.

We take the issue of online safety very seriously. Facebook has a huge responsibility when it comes to the safety and security of the people who use our service to express themselves and to share with family and friends, and we fully recognise that.

One of the biggest questions we face relates to what is allowed on Facebook and we spend a lot of time trying to get that right. It is hard but it is of critical importance. Today we are going to spend some time explaining how we approach that, how we refine that approach over time and continue to try to get it right.

From the outset let me be clear that there is no place on Facebook for content that shames or exploits young people. We know our enforcement has not always been perfect. It is a very difficult thing to get right and that is why we have made and are continuing to make major investments both in human expertise and in technology to more quickly identify and remove content that violates our policies. This is a very complex area and as the committee has heard in its previous sessions on this topic, there are many different aspects to the issue, which would be difficult for us to cover in the ten minutes we have been allotted.