Procedure and House Affairs committee  So I—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you very much. Mr. Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, thank you for the invitation to appear before you today. My name is Kevin Chan, and I am the head of public policy for Facebook Canada. I want to begin by acknowledging the importance of the subject at hand today, the integrity of our elections.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much for the question, sir. With respect to the post you referred to, if it's appropriate for me to ask if your office could follow up with me afterwards, then I would be happy to take a look at it and see what may be the issue there. Generally, sir, as you and others have pointed out, we obviously operate around the world.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much for the question, sir. You know, for good and perhaps less good, we are known for moving quite fast to get on top of things, and I think you will see, and probably have already seen in the last few weeks, that we are moving very fast to address many of the things that have been raised.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, sir. That's right.

Information & Ethics committee  There are two things. We have talked about one already, but let me just briefly underscore them. We are constantly changing and refining the way we identify fake accounts using machine learning. So again, in elections following the U.S. presidential election, we did identify tens of thousands of fake accounts for each of these electoral moments, and we put them down proactively.

Information & Ethics committee  Madame, the other thing we said very clearly is that, obviously, we're going to go back and look at all the apps that were in play at the time. If we do have evidence of malfeasance, we will ban the app from the platform and will notify all affected users.

Information & Ethics committee  Sure, if I may say, we are a platform where there are, as you point out, 23 million Canadians on service. We take that responsibility very seriously. I think the core of your concern is whether or not we take that responsibility seriously, and we absolutely do. If I may look at one issue that you're alluding to, the news issue—again I'm very much seized with working with a broader ecosystem—there are indeed seven million Canadians every day who get at least some part of their news from Facebook.

Information & Ethics committee  Sir, I, of course, would not want to speak to the specific details from another part of the world, but I can you tell you, if I may, about our global approach to this. As I mentioned earlier, we do have community standards that apply globally. Hate speech, incitement to violence, terrorist content, those sorts of things I think we can all agree should not be on the service.

Information & Ethics committee  Well, again, sir, I would just say, respectfully, in Canada.... I will circulate documents that show that before issues generally become public issues, we have long been at work with the right authorities to get things right. Again, I could just point back to the letter I have here from the Commissioner of Canada Elections, congratulating us for our efforts—

Information & Ethics committee  We understand very much where you're coming from. We understand our responsibilities. I think, as I indicated in the opening statement, we did not take a broad enough view about our responsibilities. It's not enough just to build tools that people can use; we have to ensure they're not abused.

Information & Ethics committee  Sir, are you referring to privacy or something broader?

Information & Ethics committee  I think there are many different instruments that already exist. I think the Privacy Commissioner is investigating. I think he is already very much seized with his existing abilities under mandate or statute to understand and get to the bottom of what he has.

Information & Ethics committee  Are you talking in general, sir?

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.