We will go straight into the second panel. Somewould ask monica Background Information about the Senate Intelligence investigation into russian intelligence. Some of that work has been quite insightful for us and lead to us contacting facebook and asking for similar insight to be done as to when he as to whether there was any russian activity in the u. K. I want to ask about the information that facebook has provided. Is it correct to say that all the unit all the evidence so far and the number of people that were exposed to content creation disputed by the Internet Research agency in st. Petersburg, all of that announced so far comes from the analysis facebook did identifying payments made in ruples related to advertising around that content. Monica the information we gave to the committee in testimony is the best source of information for the details about that. Didhat testimony, colin speak to how facebook conducted that investigation. Payment in rubles was one of the signals. That is one of the things the testimony is the best record of. Havest from information we received in the Senate Intelligence committee, they are clear that everything has been extrapolated from those accounts where wrubel payments where rubel payments have been made. The facebook analysis was looking at the lowest hanging rubel accounts where payments have been made and theres been no wider analysis done as to whether similar activity was taking place. Monica i can refer you to the statement, we did put out some ofts, including in april 2017 and then several of them over the summer, including one in august into september where we talked about how we did look at that sort of content. I am pleased that facebook has agreed to conduct an analysis of whether russian agencies were distributing information on the platform. Just a note, our expectation will be that wont just be based madeat ruble payments were , or whether it is likely to have come from a russian agency. Payments for advertising is one told but there are many and we hope the analysis will be wider than that. I can tell you that as i explained previously in my letter, a second investigation is underway. I has not yet completed but can tie you that we do expect to report back to the committee by the end of february the results of that investigation and we will be prepared to share with you, possibly in private because we do not want to tip off the bad actors, exactly how that work was undertaken. We look forward to seeing that at the end of the month. To what extent do you feel the company has a responsibility to see that your customers know the source of the information they are seeing . Very responsible for letting our Community Know that they are in a Safe Community and some of the questions that were put to the Previous Panel went to questions of safety and we can speak about that. That is a huge priority. It is also a priority for us to help people connect with authentic information. We know from talking to our community that it is something they care about and we are investing a lot not just in the policies for keeping our communities safe, which tend to of it is in the sense fairly black and white, in either crosses the line into something that is unsafe, but also in the area of fake news which is different. Prongeddeveloped a four approach where we are trying to make sure that when people are not with news on facebook it is reliable news and they have the ability to make decisions that are informed. Do you feel that with information people might share, Community Pages that might have a political content, it should be clear to people where those pages are being administered from. If i am seeing a page about kent where i live in england, is that being administered by somebody who lives in england theres a spectrum of what people might call news and information and one of the things that is notable about social media is it has given a voice to people in areas of the world where news outlets do not necessarily reach. There is a spectrum of information. Our job is to make sure people connect with reliable information and make their own decisions. Isnt one of the ways you empower people to make those decisions is they understand where the content is being created and the creators are who they are pretending to be. Monika there are a couple things we do to try to increase transparency. Facebook,we do on this is distinct from other services, we have a policy that requires that you use your real name. Removing falsef news, a lot of that comes from if you think about the worst types of false news, this financially motivated spam that has links that takes people to oftenms, that is propagated by fake accounts. That transparency requirement is important to removing those accounts. There is another thing we do, which is we are looking at using context as a way of informing people about their news source. This is something we are testing right now. When people see information from a news source, if there is any signal to us that that source might be unreliable, they can , and we an icon released this november of 2017, and from that icon they are taken to information taken from across the internet about the source and the reliability of the source. People do set up fake accounts and you have identified fake accounts. Monika we remove them every day. Damian what will be the harm in ofing it clear the origin material as you see it on the platform, where it is being created from, that may be a bake signal to you as to whether it is the source of been a source of information you should trust. Monika people can see who is publishing. If they are using the real name, and if they are not they take that account down. Damian it could be there for a while and people do not necessarily know the location the pages being administered from, the country or so on. Monika youre right that we do not catch every fake account at its inception. We do find and remove many of these fake accounts every day. This is also an area of tremendous technical investment for us. In the runup to the french election, the german election, were usingection, we our tools to remove thick accounts, not that those were necessarily related to spreading misinformation, but they were fake accounts and we are using technical tool to reduce the chance they might be used to spread disinformation. I will ask the same question i asked you to. Percentage of your revenues do you reinvest in identifying bad content . Is something that thousands of employees we just put out an Earnings Call where our ceo said that more than 14,000 people working at facebook are working on safety and security issues. That includes the engineers who are working on the technical systems, who identify fake accounts, who identified terror propaganda or other violating therial, it also includes work of our content reviewers who are looking at this sort of content that has been reported to us. Damian youtube said they were spending they thought tens of millions of dollars, how much is the investment for facebook in money terms . Monika i would not have oddnumbered to give you. This is such a priority i do not have a number to give you. Or than 13,000 more than 14,000 people are working on it. s jobs. These people damian you know what the ad revenue for facebook is . All of my questions are for so hopefully the u. K. Taxpayer will get the best value from my travel. You just mentioned thousands of fake accounts in connection with the u. S. Election. Thei have seen so far is 470 connected with advertising, see good could you elaborate on that statement. My statement was that in the runup to the french election, we removed thousands of accounts using these enhanced fake account technical tools. We have been investing in this area for a long time. This is not something the real name policy is not a new policy and using tools to find fake accounts is not new. We been doing this for years. We have had significant advancements in the past year and that is what has allowed us to remove those thousands of accounts. The thousands in relations to the french and not the u. S. Election . Why only 470 with the u. S. Election, who is better at french, you or the russians . Monika i can refer you to the comments that were put to the committee by my colleague. That is the best place to find information about that. That is part of an ongoing investigation. We are cooperating with the relevant authorities and that is the best source of information. Paul you do these sweeps in relation to specific events like elections or to do them all the time . Monika we are doing them all the time. Paul how many thousands of fake accounts have you suspended that have no connection with specific events like elections . Without knowing precisely, that is probably the most common scenario. Accounts many false every day and many of those are created for the purpose of sending out spam links or engaging in other bad behavior. Some of them we can catch up the time of creation and we stop them from reading the account. Others we can remove quickly after identifying them. If you cannot give us the numbers now, can you provide us with a briefing as a followup . Monika when you remove accounts quickly, you do not necessarily know what the purpose of those accounts might have been. Haveccounts we find that or createdd en masse where there are signals that they are not being accurate in in a name or engaging false way, we remove them regardless of why they have come to facebook. 470 and relation to the dollars or thousand rubles or equivalent, why did you accept that money . Of an ongoingpart investigation, we are continuing to operate with u. S. Authorities. What i can do now is refer you to the comments to the senate judiciary. Paul the question is unanswered, why did you accept the money . Do not make any efforts to know your user or your advertiser . Monika we do. With regard to our systems generally, we can speak about ads and user generated content. When it comes to ads, every ad that comes to facebook is reviewed by automated or manual review before it goes live. Ofimportant component advertising on social media is that it does happen quickly. We try to use these systems to find things like that content or an ad that might have a certain word in it that would suggest we should take the time to review it before it goes live. There are a combination of signals that might lead us to take this review after the ads go live. The review does not stop. Paul youve taken money in the first place. If you do not know your advertiser, or your user, how can you be sure you are not in breach of international sanctions, Money Laundering regulations, what responsibility do you take . A team thatave works very hard to make sure that when it comes to taking money we are complying with all laws, such as sanctioned individuals and countries. As i mentioned before, we also have a policy that requires accounts to be authentic and the advertiser must have an account before they can purchase an ad on facebook. Our advertising is a selfservice model and what that means is if you are facebook if you use facebook and you have an account, you can run an advertisement. If you do so, that advertisement will be reviewed in some fashion before those live and we will look at additional signals after the act goes live in terms in addition to how people are interacting with that and with that ad. Paul my son opened his facebook account at the age of nine and has found it unable to change his birthday. Check on who signs up stumbles at the first block. It is important for users looking forward at the integrity of facebook, and advertisers, to be reasonably confident they are dealing with real people, not fake people. What can you do to improve your game and making sure that people are dealing with real people, not fakes . That is a very important part of what we do. When people come to facebook they expect that they are interacting with real people. That is the cornerstone of our the cornerstone of our service. Age to come to facebooks 13, and we do have Automated Systems and things we can follow up in private. We do have systems that try to detect when a person is putting in a false birthdate and we have systems that restrict people changing their birthdates. We catch many people who try to come online earlier. This is something we are constantly investing and constantly improving. When we have those safetyrelated policies or not allowing people to bully others some of that can be done by google andools, like youtube. We are seeing real gains from that. A lot of that is also contextual and requires human review. There are technical tools that allow us to identify an account may be fake. It does appear that this is fake and it will do it. If i go to facebook and complain that my identity is , how long in terms of your policy would it take for that page, post, site to be removed by facebook so that i can be satisfied you are reacting . The vast majority of complaints we get from all are reviewed within 24 hours. If there is something we think a safetyrelated it goes to the front of the queue. If you are seeing an imposter account that is something we would attempt to respond to very quickly and imposter account can wreak havoc. That is not always a simple inquiry. Ive looked at our reviewers who do this work. Account and another account. You have to look not only at the date the accounts are created, the economy of the accounts to figure out which one is right, you may have to ask for the uploads of forms of identification. We dont always hit that mark. Have youink you can do much better. Ask, i wanted to. O combine something you said have you done an analysis of which country these fake accounts come from when talking about them being taken down . There are various signals our team uses. Can follow up privately and. Ollow up on those signals people who are trying to influence our elections because all materials are very regulated. Its really important, so i would appreciate it if you could. What could have a very controversial referendum in the u. K. Informationve this contains it is something we understand why people are concerned about it. Its one of the reasons why the Electoral Commission approached us in october of last or and said we would like you to assess about whether or not there was indeed misinformation coming from another country. And we were keen to cooperate on that. We reported some findings from an initial investigation to chair the committee. I think its fair to say we havent done enough work having reflected on that. Is we wont be able to tell you until that work is completed. We are committed to telling the committee the outcome of those results. The one thing i would say is unlike the u. S. Election, we intelligence any reports that suggests there were downright russian interference using facebook involved in the brexit referendum. Different where there is an Intelligence Report demonstrating. Obviously the referendum was about the membership of the European UnionGoing Forward. Countries within the eu, not the u. K. , had more of a vested interest. Are you looking at any country . I have not been aware of any parliamentary debate or newspaper stories, anything else suggesting other countries other than russia might be doing this. Is not whether we have suggested anything, im asking is a company are you looking . No we are not. There was clearly misleading information on facebook during that referendum. Anecdotally any time you knocked on a door in somebody with her you something you would say where does that information come from . They would say facebook. That was every time. What do you think the company stop that proliferation of false information that was getting shared and reshared . I think people were buying into it because people they were were trusted. H goodness only knows what is a company can you do to stop that kind of proliferation with information . I want to be clear that we do not accept that sort of proliferation of false content on facebook. I want to make sure we are distinguishing between the sorts of content like extremist content and bullying content where there is a bright line of leave it up, take it down versus fake news. Hear the term fake news, as you pointed out, many people will share stories of things they say online they see online. Those range from the financially , which is themers most common type of false news we see in the platform, down the line to these sensationalist headlines where the underlying story may be based in truth using certain words to get people to click on a headline. We cant have one policy that addresses all of that. Since this has become a topic of interest and concern over the course of the past year and a half or so we have developed a four pronged approach to this. You can take this to the point where you can say where that say what if we have a policy on only we would in no anything about an individual post whether it is true or false. It would inhibit the type of speech that it would all in case all engage in. Protecting things are speculate things are sharing opinions on things. We remove false accounts and bad known actors. Well, that takes care of a lot of that content. We try to do is disrupt the financial incentive for the sorts of actors that come to facebook. I mentioned earlier they may post links that may be exciting articles that take you off site to an ad farm. We are Getting Better at detecting those at farms. Or something that looks like a video that plays, but is a ruse to get people to click on it. Our systems are detecting that and removing that. The next thing we are trying to do is prioritize the visibility of content that is trustworthy and specifically deemed trustworthy by our community, we are very interested in this, and reduce the visibility of content where we have a reason to suspect it is unreliable. People can report to us when they believe news to be fake. We are using a system of fact checkers. If we have indication that news is fake, we reduce that visibility 1080 in their newsfeed. I really want to underscore this because i think this is something so important longterm trying to us, we are improve the ability of the not justommunity, people using facebook but journalists, policymakers, parents, to fight false news by recognizing it, distinguishing it among news sources and being able to make those responsible choices. We are doing that in the u. K. , we are working not only with young people where we have ambassadors talking about how to recognize false news, we did this to the runup to the u. K. Election, where we ran full facts for how to spot fake news. We actually went out in traditional media and published these, helping people make responsible choices. It is something we have been doing with newsletters News Literacy