Mark ZUCKERBERG, Founder and CEO of Facebook, opens the meeting of the EP Conference of Presidents, in the EP in Brussels.

Brussels

meeting

speech

protection of personal data (T)

reform of the UE Data Protection Framework (T)

ZUCKERBERG, Mark

Meeting of the EP Conference of Presidents with Mark ZUCKERBERG, founder and CEO of Facebook: extracts from the opening statement by Mark ZUCKERBERG, Founder and CEO of Facebook

Arrival of Antonio TAJANI, EP President and Mark ZUCKERBERG, Founder and CEO of Facebook at the Conference of EP Presidents (2 shots)

SOUNDBITE (English), Mark ZUCKERBERG, Facebook Founder and CEO, But it&rsquo;s also become clear over the last couple of years that we haven&rsquo;t done enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. And that goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and developers misusing people&rsquo;s information. We didn&rsquo;t take a broad enough view of our responsibility and that was a mistake. And I am sorry for it.<br /> 

SOUNDBITE (English), Mark ZUCKERBERG, Facebook Founder and CEO, But I want be clear. Keeping people safe will always be more important than maximising our profits.

SOUNDBITE (English), Mark ZUCKERBERG, Facebook Founder and CEO, It is going to take time to dwork through all of the changes that we need to make here. But I am committed to getting this right. And making the significant investments that are neccessary to keep people safe. For example, we are doubling the number of people working on safety and security at our company to more than 20,000 by the end of this year.<br /> <br />

SOUNDBITE (English), Mark ZUCKERBERG, Facebook Founder and CEO, At the heart of Europe's new Data Protection law, the GDPR, are three important principles: control, transparency and accountability. And we have always shared these values in giving people that ability to control the information they share and who they share it with. And now, we are going even further to comply with theses strong new rules. We're making the same controls and settings available to people who use facebook around the world. In addition to GDPR, we are also working to give people important new controls. For example, in your web browser you already have a simply way to clear your cookies and browsing history. So we are building a version of this for facebook too, that we are calling clear history.

SOUNDBITE (English), Mark ZUCKERBERG, Facebook Founder and CEO, In 2016, we were too slow to identify Russian interference on Facebook in the U.S. presidential elections. At the time, we were more focussed on traditional cyber attacks, like phishing, and malware. And we identified those and we told people. But we weren&rsquo;t prepared enough for the coordinated misinformation operations that we are aware of now. So since then, we have made significant investments to protect the integrity of elections by making these kinds of attacks much harder to do on facebook.

SOUNDBITE (English), Mark ZUCKERBERG, Facebook Founder and CEO, By the end of 2018, Facebook will employ 10,000 people across 12 European countries, up from 7,000 today. And we will continue to invest in Europe in the years ahead, including we've committed to provide 1 million people in small businesses with digital skills training by 2020.