Thank you.
We are all aware that the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the revenue pressures faced by news publishers. In response, we moved quickly to try to help. We announced a grant program for 85 Canadian local news publishers for emergency expenses associated with COVID-19 reporting, totalling more than $1 million. We also invested $1 million in a partnership with the Canadian Press to launch the Facebook-Canadian Press News Fellowship, creating eight new journalism positions across Canada that are directly adding capacity for reporting from local communities. We just announced two additional indigenous news fellowships.
My role and the role of my team is to partner directly with news publishers to maximize the value that free Facebook tools provide for their businesses. This includes free distribution that sends people directly to their websites, a value we estimate to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year for the Canadian news industry.
In addition, over the past four years, Facebook has invested more than $10 million in Canada's information ecosystem, and we look forward to continuing these partnerships. We're committed to doing this not because information is an important revenue generator for us—it's not—but because it's good for Canadian society and democracy.
I'll turn it back to Kevin now for some closing remarks.