Ms Julie de Bailliencourt:

I am sorry about the Deputy's experience. These are topics that we are working hard on and look to fix. Having the material from the Deputy at the end, after this session, would be useful. On reporting, it is very difficult for me to have specific input without having seen some of the instances that the committee is flagging. We often find that people may report a whole profile to alert us that there may be inappropriate behaviour or comments, but with the amount of information on Facebook on an ongoing basis, it can be difficult for us to identify where the abuse is actually taking place. Someone may have a profile that looks perfectly legitimate, like a real account, but that person may behave abusively in a group or post comments on a third party page. We encourage people to report the particular piece of content that may be abusive in order that we can form a better idea of where the abuse is really taking place and how repeated the behaviour is. The Deputy may get an answer very quickly. I can assure her that this is reviewed by a real person who looks at this report, but the person who is reviewing has a limited amount of information, so if one is reporting a whole profile, our team would not be privy to all the comments made by this person over the years, which can make the evaluation difficult. As Ms Cummiskey and Ms Sweeney mentioned, context is key. Sometimes we do not have the context.

We have been working hard to liaise with vulnerable groups and communities to understand how abuse manifests itself for these communities and how we can be more helpful. What next generation of tools can we develop? Where are we weaker in our enforcement? What can we do better? In particular, women have been targeted in ways that men have not, including women in the public eye, in politics and activists. Our role over recent years has been to engage with all of these groups across the globe to understand the specific nature of the harassment and abuse with a view to creating guides, programmes and training as well as understanding where we can continue to develop our tools and processes.

I am sorry this happened to the Deputy. She has our commitment that we will look at this. I reassure her that we have been looking at these specific issues. We have some things in the pipeline. We continuously announce new tools and new processes and we understand that this pervasive, nuanced and horrific abuse is not something that we want to have on our platform, and we want to better wrap our arms around it, as it were, to support users better.