The Conference of Presidents of the European Parliament (President and political group leaders) meets Facebook founder and CEO Mark ZUCKERBERG in the EP in Brussels to discuss the use of personal data of millions of Facebook EU users. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enters into force on Friday 25 May. Answers of Mark ZUCKERBERG, Founder and CEO of Facebook, to MEPs' questions.

Brussels

meeting

EP conference of presidents

protection of personal data (T)

reform of the UE Data Protection Framework (T)

conference of presidents

ZUCKERBERG, Mark

Meeting of the EP Conference of Presidents with Mark ZUCKERBERG, Founder and CEO of Facebook: extracts from the answers of Mark ZUCKERBERG, Founder and CEO of Facebook

SOUNDBITE (English), Mark ZUCKERBERG, Facebook Founder and CEO, If you look, for example, at terror content, one of the things that I am proud of is that our AI systems now can flag 99 percent of the ISIS and Al-Qaida related content that we ended taking down before any person in our community flags that for us. Another example is around bullying. We had this really unfortunate set of incidents when we first launched Facebook Live and when we saw that people are harming themselves or committed suicide on live and we realised that we needed to do much better job of addressing that quickly, so we have built AI tools and tools that determine if someone is thinking about harm or suicide, hired three thousand people to make it set the response time to get to those live videos is now less than ten minutes.

SOUNDBITE (English), Mark ZUCKERBERG, Facebook Founder and CEO, This is one of our top priorities, as a company, it is just making sure that we prevent anyone from trying to interfere in elections like the Russians were able to in the US Presidential elections in 2016. And, I have outlined some of the roadmap for that earlier, the game plan is the combination of building more AI tools to identify fake accounts that are trying to interfere and take them down, like we did in French presidential election where we identified and took down more than 30 000 accounts. A playbook of closer operation and cooperation with federal election commissions, like we executed in the German elections in 2017, and increase transparency.

SOUNDBITE (English), Mark ZUCKERBERG, Facebook Founder and CEO, We exist in a very competitive space, where people use a lot of different tools for communication. Where the average person uses about eight different tools for communication, ranging from all sorts of private messaging, up to more broadcast mediums to things where communicating with groups of people and all of their friends at once. So, from where I sit, it feels like there are new competitors coming up every day. They are competitors that reach tens and hundreds millions of people and we are constantly needing to evolve our service in order to stay relevant and serve people well.

SOUNDBITE (English), Mark ZUCKERBERG, Facebook Founder and CEO, We do you expect to be fully compliant (with DPR regulation) on May 25th, so in three days from now and we&rsquo;ve had a large team working on this inside Facebook to make sure that we are compliant.

SOUNDBITE (English), Mark ZUCKERBERG, Facebook Founder and CEO, The good news with Cambridge Analytica is that the changes that we made back in 2014 would prevent a new app - well, Cambridge Analytica wasn't an app, was an app developer who use the platform and then sell the data of Cambridge analytica , which is it the whole other thing. But it won&rsquo;t be possible for an app developer to get access to that model data and since after our 2014 platform changes went into a fact. But because there are a lot of different apps that were using the system before 2014 and before the changes went into effect in 2015, we think it&rsquo;s important now to go back and investigate every single app that have access to a large amount of people&lsquo;s personal data, before we lockdown the platform.

So that's what we are in the process of doing,  we already investigated thousands of apps and as I said earlier we are taking down more than 200, there and your many thousands more than we need to investigate this is going to take many months. I do you anticipate that you&rsquo;re going to be other apps that we find that we&rsquo;re going to wanna take down and this is why we&rsquo;re going out and doing this for investigation.