Mr. Joel Kaplan:

As each of the last round of questioners at some point touched on elections and fake accounts, maybe I will start there and hopefully will cover all those concerns. The changes that we are making with the "view ads" tool are the first phase of the transparency tools that we have announced. In response to Deputy Bríd Smith, I certainly understand the frustration and the desire that those should be out as quickly as possible - we would make them available tomorrow if we could. These things take time to develop and implement.

We are accelerating the deployment of the "view ads" tool in Ireland as quickly as we can. It is not going to roll out globally until some time later this spring or early summer, probably in mid-June. Because of the results in Canada, and the fact that the tests there had progressed to such a point that we had confidence that we could deploy it here a month before the referendum and do it in a way that it would work, we made the decision only in recent days to accelerate and include Ireland as part of the pilot programme. It will be the second and the only other country where we roll out the tool before the global deployment.

Overall, we certainly appreciate the concerns about interference in elections, distortion of the democratic process and the role that fake accounts can play in that process. We learned a lot as a result of the 2016 US elections and Brexit. We have devoted tremendous resources, in terms of both personnel and development of technology, to addressing some of the concerns that manifested themselves in those elections. In 2018 we are doubling the number of people dedicated to safety and security from 10,000 to more than 20,000, with a big focus on election integrity. We are investing in artificial intelligence tools, in particular ones that can help us identify and remove fake accounts before they are even uploaded onto the site or have a presence on it.

There have been a number of big elections since the US election including the French election, the German election and the election in the US state of Alabama. In each of those elections, we put together an internal task force with representatives across the company that was dedicated to doing everything we could to detect interference, in particular foreign interference. We have had good results. In the French election, we were able to detect and remove tens of thousands of politically motivated fake accounts. We had similar good results in Germany. In Alabama, which was a very controversial and hotly contested election in the United States, we were able to deploy the same type of task force, and identified a number of Macedonian fake accounts. We believe they were more financially than politically motivated but we removed those as well.

We stood up a task force like that for the upcoming referendum. We will be deploying the artificial intelligence technologies we have developed to try to detect those fake accounts as quickly as we can. We detect literally millions a day and remove them before they are ever seen on the site. We need to continually improve that capability and make the investments to do so, and that is what we are doing.