Chair, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to be here today.
I'm Neil Potts. I'm a Director with oversight of the development and implementation of Facebook's community standards. Those are our guidelines for what types of content are allowed on our platform.
Before I continue, though, I'd just like to point out that Kevin and I are global directors, subject matter area experts, ready to engage with you on these issues. Mark and Sheryl, our CEO and COO, are committed to working with government in a responsible manner. They feel that we have their mandate to be here today before you to engage on these topics, and we are happy to do so.
As you know, Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and to bring the world closer together. More than two billion people come to our platform every month to connect with family and friends, to find out what's going on in the world, to build their businesses and to help those in need.
As we give people a voice, we want to make sure that they're not using that voice to hurt others. Facebook embraces the responsibility of making sure that the tools we build are used for good and that we keep people safe. We take those responsibilities very seriously.
Early this month, Facebook signed the Christchurch Call to Eliminate Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content Online, and we have taken immediate action on live streaming. Specifically, people who have broken certain rules on Facebook, which include our “dangerous organizations and individuals” policy, will be restricted from using Facebook Live.
We are also investing $7.5 million in new research partnerships with leading academics to address the adversarial media manipulation that we saw after Christchurch—for example, when some people modified the video to avoid detection in order to repost it after it had already been taken down.
As the number of users on Facebook has grown, and as the challenge of balancing freedom of expression and safety has increased, we have come to realize that Facebook should not be making so many of these difficult decisions alone. That's why we will create an external oversight board to help govern speech on Facebook by the end of 2019. The oversight board will be independent from Facebook, and it will be a final level of appeal for what stays up and what comes down on our platform.
Even with the oversight board in place, we know that people will use many different online platforms and services to communicate, and we'd all be better off if there were clear baseline standards for all platforms. This is why we would like to work with governments to establish clear frameworks related to harmful online content.
We have been working with President Macron of France on exactly this kind of project, and we welcome the opportunity to engage with more countries going forward.
Kevin.