Good morning. Thank you for inviting me here.
My name is Monika Bickert. l'm the head of global policy management at Facebook. I will be providing my remarks here today in English.
My job at Facebook is all about creating an environment that both encourages people to express themselves and promotes safety and respect. I'm deeply invested in making sure that Facebook is a safe place where people feel comfortable connecting with those they care about. I say this not only as an employee, but also as a mother of two daughters who are growing up in an increasingly connected world.
I came to Facebook after spending more than a decade fighting child exploitation and human trafficking as a federal prosecutor in the United States and as a legal adviser to foreign law enforcement agencies. I share your commitment to keeping people safe online. That's why I feel so proud of the work we are doing at Facebook to give people the ability to connect and to share in a safe and privacy protected way.
We're aware of the complex questions that Bill C-13 raise about cyberbullying, law enforcement, access to data, and other challenges. We appreciate the opportunity to share perspectives with you today on our approach to safety and the way that policy-makers, safety advocates, and industry can work together to build safer communities for everyone, both online and offline. We believe it's important to understand the safety tools, programs, and partnerships that we use to address the challenges of cyberbullying.
Facebook's mission is to help give people the power to share and to make the world more open and connected. Over 1.28 billion people across the globe are using Facebook on a regular basis to share information—messages, photos, videos, and status updates—with their friends and family. That includes over 19 million people in Canada. Facebook is committed to retaining the trust of the people who use our service and to providing a safe and secure online experience.
We've developed a comprehensive approach to keeping kids and others safe on Facebook. That includes strong enforcement of our community standards, robust technological solutions and tools, and partnerships with safety groups to educate people about how best to protect themselves and their friends and family online. We continually work to improve our safety program, and we welcome the feedback that we receive from people who use the service, including policy-makers and safety experts.
Our community standards make clear that we have zero tolerance for bullying, harassment, threats, and explicit content like pornography. We impose strict limitations on the display of nudity. We walk a careful line between respecting people's right to share content of personal importance with the need to ensure a safe environment for everyone in our community. We have teams around the world that work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to respond to reports about content that might violate our community standards. If content does violates our standards, we remove it from the site. We may also take other actions, such as warning or disabling the account of the person who posted the content or, in extreme cases, alerting law enforcement about threats of real-world violence, self-harm, or child exploitation.
We prioritize serious cases, as well as reports of harassment, bullying and other forms of abuse, because we care very much about people feeling safe when they use our platform. We've also deployed technology to block the sharing of child exploitation images on Facebook, including in private groups, or to flag it for immediate review by our safety team.
In collaboration with Microsoft and the U.S.'s National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, we use a technology called PhotoDNA. This allows us to instantaneously identify, remove, and report to the national centre, known abusive images. The national centre then coordinates with law enforcement around the world to take further action.
We've established a safety advisory board composed of internationally recognized safety experts, who provide us with timely seasoned advice on our products and policies. We try to make it as easy as possible for people to take action based on problems they have or that they see when they're on Facebook. Not only do we have report links that are displayed prominently around the site—you can find these report links on every piece of content on Facebook—we've also created a range of innovative tools and controls for teens, parents, and educators to resolve conflict, both in the online and in the off-line worlds. For example, based on research that we've done about how people communicate concerns to each other, we've developed innovative social resolution tools that allow young people to use Facebook to ask authority figures, friends, and family members for help when they're in a situation where they're feeling uncomfortable.
Our social resolution tools also help young people to speak up when they see others being bullied. Because most bullying that happens on Facebook starts and ends off-line, we realize that even with all of the work that we do in this area, it will always be parents, teachers, and other community leaders who will have the best context to understand what's happening and the best ability to intercede where appropriate.
While tools are important for enabling people to take action on behalf of themselves or others, we also believe that we have an important role to play in educating people about our policies, how to use the tools to help themselves and others, and how to have crucial conversations about staying safe online.
However, we cannot do this alone, so we partner with leading organizations that reach youth across Canada. We're proud supporters of the Government of Canada's get cyber safe campaign. We have worked with officials, as well as the Canadian Teachers' Federation, to promote our "Think Before You Share" guide nationwide. This guide, which you can find—it's publicly available—gives young people the tools that they need to share safely and responsibly, as well as advice for what to do when things go wrong.