Facebook, Inc.
Moderator: Brady Glenn
03-18-20/10:30 a.m. PT
Confirmation # 8368103
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Facebook, Inc.
Moderator: Brady GlennMarch 18, 2020
10:30 a.m. PT

FINAL EDITED TEXTOPERATOR:
This is Conference # 8368103
Operator:

Hello, and welcome to today’s Facebook Press Call. There will be prepared
remarks and a Q&A to follow. To ask a question after the prepared remarks
conclude, please press star one. Now I’d like to turn the call over to Dave
Arnold who will kick this off.

Dave Arnold:

Thanks, (Megan), and thanks, everybody, for joining the call today. This isDave Arnold from the Facebook Communications Team. We’re hosting thiscall in order to share some updates on our efforts in response to thecoronavirus.
On the call today is Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO of Facebook, and we
also have on the line KX Jin who is Facebook’s Head of Health. He’ll be able
to help answer any questions.
Before we start, I just want to reiterate that this call is on the record andthere’s no embargo, so with that, I will turn it over to Mark.

Mark Zuckerberg: All right. Thanks, Dave, and thanks, everyone, for joining today. All right, so
today I want to share a couple of steps – new steps that we’re taking to
respond to the coronavirus outbreak.

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It’s something that we’ve been tracking closely for awhile across the world,
but it’s, of course, become a little bit more severe of a case in the last couple
of weeks, especially in a lot of western countries.
So I figured it would probably make sense to start off with some of the efforts
that we’ve had so far to respond, and then I will get to a couple of the newthings that we’re announcing today.
So to get started, the top priority and focus for us has been making sure thatpeople can get access to good, authoritative information from trusted healthsources. So in order to do that, we’ve had a program where we partnered with
the WHO and CDC and local health and government organizations.
I mean, we basically put a promotion on the top of Instagram and very
prominent throughout the Facebook feed linking to the CDC. We’ve given
those organizations as many ad credits as they need to get their messages out
and PSAs.
We’re – anytime that someone’s searching for information on coronavirus,
we’re inserting a popup that links to authoritative information from thosesources, and then one of the things that we’re going to talk about today that
we’re launching is also going to focus on pushing out more authoritative
information more broadly across these networks, and I’ll come back to that ina minute.
At the same times we’re pushing out and focusing on authoritative
information, we’re also very focused on making sure that misinformation
doesn’t spread.
And here we’ve also been able to partner with these organizations, including
the WHO, to identify a list of claims that they classify as harmful
misinformation, and we’ve been able to operationalize them – that and removethat and that down under the principle we don’t allow content that could cause
imminent risk of danger.
Even in the most free-expression, friendly traditions like the United States,
you’ve long had the precedent that you don’t allow people to yell fire in a

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crowded room, and that – I think it’s similar to people spreading dangerous
misinformation in the time of an outbreak like this.
So that's part of the reason why we've been very focused on working with the
WHO to make sure that we can identify the list of claims that we need to act
on quickly and make sure we (take down right). I think that while the response
there isn't perfect so far and I guess it's hard to ever be perfect at scale, I think
we're -- we've executed on this quite well so far, and I'm proud of that
response.
On top of information quality, the other thing that we're seeing is that in thetime of a disaster or when people can't be together with their friends andfamilies in person, which we're experiencing basically both of those things
right now, people really rely on social and communication services more thanat any other times.
So we're certainly seeing some surges in usage of the different services acrossareas, especially those that are affected, and the teams are hard at work justmaking sure that all of the services continue to run smoothly during this time
because this is clearly a moment where people want make sure they stayconnected while everyone is practicing social distancing and following theguidance that the governments are giving on this.
We want to make sure that we can help do our part to alleviate loneliness andhelp people come together. So just making sure that the services continue torun reliably (whilst seeing) is going to be quite large surges across ourservices is a big priority for us right now.
We're very focused on the economic response as well. This is not going to justbe a major health crisis, it's, I think also going to be a major economic shock,especially to small businesses and businesses that rely on people being able togo out in person and interact with them.
So we're trying to figure out what steps we can take there to help out.
Yesterday we announced $100 million (grants) program to support therecovery of 30,000 small businesses in the cities that our employees live andwork. I think that that's one step in the direction of what needs to happen, butFacebook, Inc.
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we really believe in and focusing on empowering individuals and small
businesses.
Small businesses are often not just the backbone of the economy, but thecenter of a lot of local communities and if that fails, and I think that will havereally bad consequences over the long-term coming out of this. So we’recontinuing to look at things we can do to help with the recovery there.
I want to touch for a moment on the steps that we're taking with our own
workforce in order to make sure that we're keeping people safe and doing ourpart from a public health perspective to stop -- or slow the spread of the virus.
As of a couple of weeks ago, we started working on -- across a lot of Westerncountries, recommending that everyone moved towards working from home(and of course) the virus has been spreading in East Asia for more than acouple of months now, so we've been -- and we have offices in a lot ofcountries there as well.
So we've -- we have been working on this for that extended period of time anda lot of our employees been working from home since January.
But in the U.S. and across Europe and now globally, we basically moved
everyone to recommending they work from home, except for some -- somereally critical functions, keeping the servers running, security, safety for thecommunity, that really can't be done at home.
We're -- this week, we also are moving to basically (making it so that all ofour) contingent workforce and our contractors can leave the office and canwork from home as well, and -- and that includes the content moderators who(inaudible) on our services.
And part of that -- what we're -- what we're doing is a lot of these folks aren't
going to be able to continue the normal work that they do while they're at -while they're at home, and to make sure that we can -- that we can do our parts
not contributing to an economic shock on this.

Facebook, Inc.
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Page 5We're going to make sure that all of those contractors and contingent workers
continue getting paid in full for all of their time, even if they're practically notable to do the work that they would have done in the office from home.
I'm happy to take more questions on that in a minute as well, but in general,
I've been proud of the tech industry's response on that overall, and I think thata lot of the companies in the tech industry are setting a good example for the
rest of businesses around how to act responsibly with their workforce in orderto do what we can to slow the spread of this, to make sure that the healthcare
system doesn't get overwhelmed.
With that, I want to turn to a couple of new announcements that we're making
today. The first fits the theme of encourage more authoritative information,
and what we're basically doing is we're -- we've built, in collaboration with a
lot of our health partners in these organizations that I mentioned before, acoronavirus information center that we are going to be putting at the top of
everyone's Facebook feed.
We're going to be rolling this out in a number of places around the U.S. andEurope in the next 24 hours, and then other places -- hopefully more globallyover the next -- over the days to come, and the goal here is going to be to put
authoritative information from organizations like the CDC and WHO in frontof everyone who uses our services, as well as prominent links to the websitesof those organizations.
We've been coordinating a lot with governments around the world, fromnational governments to state and local governments on what messages they
think are most important for us to be pushing out and encouraging, and right
now the broad consensus is that the biggest role that we can help play is
encouraging people to take the social distancing orders seriously, but
especially folks who might feel like they're not personally at risk, but forbroader public health perspective need to -- we need to make sure that people
honor this.
So a big part of this hub will be basically showing content from public healthexperts, celebrities, visualizations that academics or journalists have putFacebook, Inc.
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together that can basically show people good information that is going to be
encouraging the right behaviors on this.
And lastly, a big part of this is going to be about helping communities cometogether through our services to help each other out.
Right, if people need someone to go collect groceries from the store fromthem, or need different things, we've had a community help feature that we'verolled out in other disasters in the past.
Like if there's a hurricane in a place, we've never had to do it at the scale that
we're talking about doing here for (basically) across the whole community at
the same time.
But, where we're going to move forward with that and we will start to see thatover the next few days as well. So, that's the Coronavirus Information Center
and we're going to be putting it at the top of everyone's Facebook feed. So,
that's the first piece.
The second piece goes along the thread of people needing communication andsocial services more in difficult times like this in responding to disasters. And
one of the things that we found in running Facebook is, a number of years
back we built this tool that we eventually called the Workplace, but originally
it was just an internal version of Facebook at Facebook.
And it became so critical to how we ran the company and coordinated large
groups of people, especially people who work in data centers, people who are
not on e-mail all day long, help people coordinate across the company, that we
kind of though to ourselves, hey, this is something that we should enable otherpeople to use too.
And we've been doing that for a while and it's been -- it's been growing
separately, but now in the middle of this situation we want to make sure that
we're enabling governments and emergency service organizations to use this.
So, we're going to be making it free for governments and emergency
organizations to use these tools for the next 12 months.

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Governments and emergency service organizations are kind of right in thesweet spot for the type of folks who we think can get value from a service like
this, because it's not all (inaudible) workers, they're not all at their computers,
having a familiar interface like social feeds, but with groups at yourworkplace, where people can disseminate information within theirorganization we think could be pretty useful at this time. And we want tomake that available to people if it's -- if it's something they want to use.
So, I want to wrap up, so that way we can take questions. But, I mean, toclose, I just want acknowledge that this is clearly a very difficult and stressful
time for a lot of people, and we want to make sure that we're doing what we
can to support the public health response, but I also just want conclude bytaking a moment to thank all of the health workers and folks who are really on
the frontlines fighting this. And some of the work that these folks are doing isabsolutely heroic.
And I personally am very grateful for what they're doing and I think at the endof the day, that's going to be the biggest thing that makes a difference here.
So, I'm going to wrap now and I'm happy to take any questions that you haveabout our response or how we're thinking about any of this.
Operator:

We will now open the line for questions. Please limit yourself to one question
per person. To ask a question, please press "star" followed by the number "1."
Our first question is from Katie Paul with Reuters. Your line is open.

Katie Paul:Hey Mark, thanks for doing this call. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit
about data sharing with the U.S. Government. There's been reports about how
there might be -- there's a taskforce getting together and there might be somechanges to how tech companies share data currently.
I know there's already Facebook disaster maps, but can you tell us which
components of the U.S. Government will be leveraging the data? Do you
know how it will be used?

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Page 8Does it shut off at the end of this situation? Are you comfortable withmilitary or intelligence communities potentially – whether in aggregated formor not, just where those things stand?
Mark Zuckerberg: Sure, as far as I can tell those reports are largely overstated. So as you say wehave this program around disease prevention maps that we’ve been doing forsome time.
The health organizations around the world, and of course the way that thatworks is that people (in our services opt in) to using location data, and to beable to share their location data and to be able to share their location data.
And we produce these aggregate and anonymized data sets to healthorganization basically identify the spread of certain kinds of diseases andproduce maps from that.
As far as we (could shake down) from internally, once I saw these reports, is
we’re not aware of any active conversations or asks with the U.S. or othergovernments at this point asking for access to that data directly. So I thinksome of those reports might have just been rehashing the disease prevention
maps projects that we’ve been doing in the past.
But I don’t think that there are direct asks for access to people with data
directly. There was – the request that we’ve gotten mostly from governments
have largely been about helping to disseminate authoritative information, andmaking sure that we stay on top of preventing misinformation from spreading.
So those are the biggest things that we’re focused on and that’s lead to anumber of the steps that we’ve taken including giving pretty much as many adcredits as these organizations need, running promotions at the top of
Instagram and Facebook, and then of course leading to the coronavirus
information center that we’re releasing (inaudible) going to really include allof – a lot of their messaging in one place.
Operator:

Our next question is from Martin Untersinger with Le Monde. Your line isopen.

Facebook, Inc.
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Page 9Martin Untersinger: Hello, thanks for doing this call. Understood that there are no discussions
about sharing data to fight the coronavirus outbreak, but would you be readyto have the discussion with the U.S, or any other western government? Thankyou.
Mark Zuckerberg: I’m not really sure what that means. I mean, I think the program that we haveright now is working with health experts, and I think that it is quite effective.
I don’t think it would make sense to share people’s data in a way where
people didn’t have – didn’t opt to doing that.
So, I mean, I think at a high level the answer is probably no to what you’resaying, but (it’s sort of) a hypothetical because no one is asking for this.
Operator:

Our next question is from Mike Isaac with “The New York Times,” your line
is open.

Mike Isaac:

Hey all, thanks for doing this call. Mark, I’m just sort of curious what you allare doing to cooperate with other tech companies right now?
I know there was a meeting at the White House with a number of different
tech companies, and I’m wondering how you all are working together to I
guess put some of that good information out there? And then also I’m justcurious if you’re working from Facebook or if you’re working from hometoo?

Mark Zuckerberg: Sure, so I think – for the collaboration of other tech companies, I think that
there’s (inaudible) around basically partnering together to identify
misinformation and things like that, that we need to make sure that we’readdressing.
The collaboration with the other companies has generally gotten a lot stronger
on fighting bad content over the last few years. Whereas we’ve dealt with awhole lot of issues; probably the gold standard of that collaboration is GIFCT,
the Global Internet Forum for Counter Terrorism.
Which we stood up with a bunch of the other tech companies, basically tocoordinate on all the counter terrorism at first; of course there’s been long

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Page 10standing work on countering child exploitation and I do think that we’ll findadditional ways to work together on this type of threat as well.
But in general, I think that the theme has been more collaboration with boththe tech industry and governments on being able to fight that kind of bad
content.
I think -- you asked if I’m working from home, I’m definitely working fromhome. I don’t think it would be very good to encourage everyone else to dothat and then not do that myself. And I think so far I’d just like everyone toexperiencing, it’s a big change to work from home.
It’s especially a big change now that the school’s are closed and all thechildren are around, so we’re not just asking our work force to adapt to remote
work, we’re also trying to find a balance of moving things forward whilepeople need to balance their role is basically taking care of the kids during the
day as well.
So that’s been a balance that I think we’re trying to help the whole company
navigate.
But overall it’s also been an opportunity to use a bunch of our products morein different ways and I’m sure this is going to lead to a bunch of new
development of different things, that – to enable the new kinds of needs thatpeople need to – that people have while they’re at home for some time.
Operator:

And our next question is from Shannon Bond with National Public Radio,
your line is open.

Shannon Bond:

Hi, thanks for taking my question. I’m wondering, Mark, if you can talk a bit
about – with the content moderators who aren’t able to do work from home,
how will that work load get done?
Are you relying more on machine learning, like are other people picking it up?
Mark, can you just talk a bit about the impact on making sure that things are
getting taken care of?

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Mark Zuckerberg: Yes, so this is a – this is a big one that we’ve been really focused on for thelast few days. So there – so there’s been a few challenges in – additionally inmoving the content moderators to be able to work from home on top of ourown full time employees.
The first, of course there’s just sort of a logistical piece is that we don’t
employ those continued worker and contracts – the people of those contract
partner’s directly, so we’ve had to negotiating work through those companies.
That took a little bit of time.
But then in terms of the actual work, there are a few challenges that we’ve
needed to make sure that we can manage. One is that – the biggest one is that
there’s certain types of content moderation that are just very, very sensitive,
right, so suicide and (inaudible).
If you’re in the queues working on that content for a long time, that can bevery emotionally challenging, and a lot of what we’ve done over the years isbuilt up in the office environment and these places the mental health support,
the resiliency training, forcing that people take breaks so that way they cankind of get time to recover.
That kind of thing is very important and a big part of our concern is that, if we
now had contractors, who we don’t employ and can’t directly -- and it takessome time to work with their contract company to basically set guidelines for
how they work, now working from home on those types of things, that will bevery challenging to enforce that people are getting the mental health support
that they needed.
For some of these queues, there are also privacy questions about individual
data and making sure that if folks are looking at that at home, that we have theright protections in place. So, here’s what we’re basically doing.
We have moved, or are in the process of moving, the most sensitive types ofcontent that need to get extra attention over to full-time employees for thetime being. So that’s the work on suicide and self-injury prevention, it’s thework on child exploitation, counter-terrorism, those are kind of the types ofexamples.

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We’re actually surging the number of people who are working on those
things. I’m personally quite worried that the isolation from people being at
home could potentially lead to more depression or mental health issues and wewant to make sure that we are ahead of that in supporting our community byhaving more people during this time work on things that are on suicide andself-injury prevention, not less.
So, we’re -- so we basically shifted out work, so that it’s more full-time workforce, and we’re surging some of that, which inherently is going to create a
trade-off against some other types of contents that may not have as imminent
physical risks for people.
Some of that we will -- the good news for some of this is that we’ve had beenworking for the last few years on building AI systems that we goal ourselveson what percent of that content we can find and take down proactively, so a
lot of these categories were in a reasonable place.
But I do think it’s reasonable to expect that for some of the other categories
where the severity might not be as imminent or extreme, that we may be alittle less effective in the near term while we’re adjusting to this.
But the goal for the continued workers and the contractors is that, while
they’re working from home, to hopefully have them set up to be able to workon the types of content that would be a little less emotionally and physically(inaudible), and have that and some of that stuff will need to still be done byteams in person together in the same way that first responders and healthorganizations or the police kind of need to act to work on different threats.
Operator:

Our next question is from (Linda Descino) with (Eltimano). Your line is
open.

(Linda Descino): Hi, Mark. Thanks for opening this space. Considering that your (obligations)
are Instagram, Facebook, and Instagram are the most used (and familiarly of
countries), why haven’t you start on considering the option of sending somealerts in WhatsApp, Facebook, or Instagram like reminders, for example, towash hands or to clean out their cell phones.

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I wonder because many of the actions that individuals can actualize are like inthis basic health habit. So have you think in something like that in this kind ofalert in your whole wide world -- worldwide services?
Mark Zuckerberg: Yes, absolutely. And when we talked about our efforts to get authoritative
information out in front of people, these were some of the measures that I was-- that I was describing.
We’ve been -- we run a promotion at that top of Instagram and throughout thefeed in -- on Facebook with these kinds of public health messages and linking
people to the websites of CDC and WHO where were they can get more
information from those organizations.
And I don’t think that it’s -- we’re not best placed to decide what the publichealth messages should be. We want to work with these public health partners
in messages. It’s why we’ve also given them as many ad credits as they need.
So basically its free ads -- free space on our services to be able to push out as
many messages as they need to around these things.
And I know the WHO, for example, right now has the campaign aroundencouraging people to wash hands. A lot of messaging coming out of the U.S.
right now and a lot of places in Europe is very focused on how we practice todo social distancing.
I think people kind of have heard the message at a high level (but with) very
specific questions about how do they -- how do they do things that they needto do, how do you get food. How -- so just specific things. And that, we’re
working them to get out.
The coronavirus information center that we’re launching, we’re designing it tobe very adaptive. So that on a day to basis as the messages that people need tohear and that as the public health organizations want to send out on a day to
day basis vary and vary from location to location because the guidance isdifferent in different countries that we’ll be able to adapt to that and fit theneeds of what people and the health organizations and governments need in allthese different places.

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Operator:

Our next question is from Zoe Thomas with BBC. Your line is open.

Zoe Thomas:

Hi. I wanted to find out how long you’re prepared to pay the contract workers
to work from home. Do you know how long that will be going on for?

Mark Zuckerberg: I think we don’t see an end to that. Hopefully at some point when the publichealth response has been sufficient, people can resume to working in theoffice. But we don’t view this as a time bounded -- as time bounded thing.
Operator:

Our next question is from Bob Woodruff with ABC News. Your line is open.

Bob Woodruff:

Hey, Mark. Thanks again for this. Is there any -- is there any -- do you have anumber or some kind of percentage or how much scams, how muchmisinformation you’ve been able to keep out of the system from people toread on Facebook? I know it’s – I’ve been really talking only about thecorona crisis that’s going on right now.
Do you have any idea of how much has come through and how long do you
think this is going to last? It’s impossible to predict when this will slow downin the world, in the United States, but do you have any thoughts since you
have a lot of information about exactly what’s happening out there?

Operator:

Our next question is from (Justice Bender) with (VAS). Your line…

Mark Zuckerberg: Well, I should probably answer that before we got to the next question. So
how long do we think this will last? And do we have any specific data on theamount of misinformation that we’re taking down?
I haven’t seen a specific report on that. KX, I don’t know if you have any
specific stat. If you do, feel free to jump in. Otherwise, I’ll just continue
going here. It’s tough coordinating with someone else trying to do a press callwhen they’re not in the same place as you.
In terms of how long we think this will last, I’m not a public health expert. So
it’s – I’m not sure that it’s good for me to opine on that. I do think it’s a little
confidence inspiring that in some of the earlier countries that had – that hadoutbreaks that after measures taken by the governments and public healthFacebook, Inc.
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officials things do seem to be returning to somewhat of a more normal
cadence.
And I don’t know if there’s anything through Facebook usage that definitely
suggests that – a timeframe for this, but maybe we’ll start seeing somethingsoon in some of the countries in South Korea and Japan that had earlier
outbreaks.
And, of course, we’re not really in China so it’s tough for us to track or haveany sense of the momentum of what’s going on there, but we may see
something in the coming weeks and that would be good.
In addition to the work that we’re doing at Facebook, I do have another lens
into this work which is the work that we do at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,
our family’s philanthropy where a big focus of that is on science andbiological science.
And the long-term goal for the organization is to make it so that we can cure,prevent, or be able to manage all diseases by the end of the century, so a lot ofwhat we do is basically make it so that we build tools for health workers andscientists to make further advancements on this, and to that there’s a little bitof a lens that we have into some of the early research that’s being done todevelop therapeutics.
And one of the things that we’re somewhat optimistic about – I mean, I want
to be – I want to be cautious about this and we don’t have line of sight toanything yet – is there are a lot of scientists who have theories of existing,approved therapeutics that worked for – that have already gone through theirsafety clearance and worked for some disease, whether it was related or
unrelated to -- or maybe it acts on some receptor that there could be relevant
here.
With a -- a concerted effort to test to the most promising of those kind ofcompounds, it's possible that that later this year, we will have more therapies
that could be useful in either preventing or treating the symptoms of this tomake it (it said it creates) long-term damage or fatality.

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So that I think would be very promising, but I think it's just -- the situation is
evolving very quickly and we know a lot more about the trajectory that we'reon here in the U.S. for example, in just the last seven days, and I think we'll
know a lot more a week or two from now about how long this is going to be as
well.
Operator:

Your next question is from (Justice Bender) with (VAZ). Your line is open.

(Justice Bender): Hi, thank you so much. My question is, why is it so easy for Facebook to doso much now against fake news and why is it so hard in a political context tosuppress misleading political misinformation? And are you -- is this a test foryou to change your stance on political fake news in the future?
Mark Zuckerberg: Well, I think that this is a different case for two reasons. One is we've always
had our policy that doesn't allow content that's going to cause imminent
danger or physical risk.
And not -- that's cornerstone of all the work, not just around misinformation
but around hate speech that could incite violence, around child (inaudible) andall of the different areas.
We've never allowed things that would lead to imminent physical risk and as
I've mentioned in my opening remarks, even countries like the United Statesthat have the strongest traditions on free expression, the standard here is you
can't yell fire in a crowded theater, basic idea.
It's that you want to allow a wide range of expression, but you don't want tosupport things that are going to lead to imminent physical harm work foryourself or others.
So in the case of a pandemic like this where we're seeing hoaxes that arebasically encouraging people who are sick to not get treatment or to not act inways that are going to protect the people around them or in some ways to do
things that could be actively harmful, right, so I mean, there's one hoax goingaround that if you think you have this, drink bleach and that will cure it.

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And that's terrible that's obviously going to lead to imminent harm if you dothat. That is just in a completely different class of content than some of thekind of back-and-forth accusations that a candidate might make about another,for example, during an election.
The other piece here is that there are broadly trusted authorities who people
across -- including governance, who people are just across society would all
agree can arbitrate which claims are conspiracy theories or hoaxes and what's
trustworthy and what's not, which makes this a very different dynamic thantrying to be referee of political speech.
I mean and the WHO for example, or CDC, just do have broad trust and agovernment mandate on this in a way that in other domains there just (isn't)
something like that. So I think that that's -- but you're basically asking about
things that I think are on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of difficultyof operationalizing the response.
I think for health misinformation that's probably -- during a pandemic or
outbreak like this, that's probably one of the most black and white situations
that you could expect. And I think political speech is probably the mostdifficult in terms of how you arbitrate and kind of govern that kind of speech.
Operator:

Our next question is from Bruno Rufilli with La Stampa. Your line is open.

Bruno Rufilli:

Hi there. I am in Italy and all I can say is that people are using Facebook andInstagram like never before. Italy is the first big Western country to facecoronavirus.
Is there something you have learned from here that can be useful for othercountries? Is there a specific trend that you have noticed here in Italy and are
you planning any special activity for my country?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yes, we've certainly seen a number of trends that, (if we're) (inaudible) out
from Italy to other countries would be very problematic in those countries andhave given a sense of which things we might want to try to get on top of inother places.

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We've also seen some really inspiring things in Italy that we want to try toenable in other places. So for example, I think the Pope is doing his daily
mass on Facebook Live now, so that the people who cannot go to their placeof worship on daily basis have a place to have that connection.
There's an ICU physician in Bergamo who -- this anesthetist who's been
sharing every day, a readout of what she's seeing in the hospital. Thatbasically -- those kind of firsthand accounts I think often tell a much deeper
story than just a bunch of stats.
And when you read that, I think that that was extremely helpful in convincing
people around the world that this isn't just flu, right, which I think was someof the questions that people were asking even a week or two ago about this. I
think some of the stories coming out about that have been extremely
important.
There's psychiatrists and doctors in Lombardy who are using WhatsApp to
make calls to people to make sure that they can cope with the stress andanxiety of the quarantines. And reaching out to dozens and dozens of patientsbeyond her normal patients in order to be able to help and support people.
So these are some of the kind of pretty amazing ways that we're seeing people
use the services to help support their community and get the word out about
what they're seeing.
In terms of stats, we're seeing very elevated levels of use in Italy and in all
countries that have been affected. Calling, right -- so in terms of WhatsApp or
Messenger for calling is more than double overall what it normally is.
So the normal spike for us is New Years Eve, right, where basically everyone
at the same time just wants to message everyone and takes a selfie and sends
to their family wherever they are, and to wish them a Happy New Year. And
we are (inaudible) basis well beyond what that spike is, on New Years.
And just making sure that we can manage that is the challenge that we ‘retrying to make sure that we can stay in front of because of course right now
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but it is – if it gets there then we really need to make sure we’re on top of thisfrom an infrastructure perspective to make sure that things don’t melt down,
and we can continue to provide the level of service that people need in a time
like this.
So these are probably – those are some of the trends that we’re seeing. I guesson the public health side, I can just speak to this personally, I mean this is not
so much in my Facebook capacity, maybe a little more in my Chan
Zuckerberg initiative capacity.
I think that the public health risk that everyone is worried about is if theoutbreak grows too quickly then we run out of beds and resources in thehealth system and that leads to significantly worse health outcomes, which
unfortunately I think we are seeing in a lot of places – in Italy.
So I think the U.S. and other European countries really need to learn form
what we’re seeing in Italy, to get in front of this. And actions that seem likethey’re on the border of going too far today, I think if this continues to spreadat the exponential rate that it has, in a week we’ll be thinking we’d wished
done it even earlier, right? That’s just the nature of this kind of exponential
growth.
So in terms of doing our part to help in our communities in the Bay area,internationally – and around the world, stand up the health capacity – reopen
decommissioned hospitals. Do different things that need to get done toincrease capacity – we’re very focused on that after seeing the lessons fromwhat’s happening in Italy and some of the earlier countries as well.
So yes, it’s – I do also just want to say it’s – I know a lot of people who are
there in Italy, and it’s obviously a very tough situation, and I just want to offer
my personal acknowledgement and tell everyone there that I’m thinking ofyou, and it’s inspiring to see how you’re pulling together to get through this.
Operator:

Your next question is from Sarah Frier with Bloomberg, your line is open.

Sarah Frier:

Hello Mark, I just wanted a little bit more information on the coronavirus’
information with regards to other countries and other languages. Are youFacebook, Inc.
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Page 20going to be able to have this information center available globally, and in how
many languages? Thanks.
Mark Zuckerberg: Sure. The goal is to have it out very widely. I don’t have a number on thenumber of languages it’s going to be in, but certainly we want it to be global.
In the next 24 hours our goal is to launch it, and have it be promoted at the topof the Facebook app in Italy, in France, and Spain, and Germany, and the U.S.
and U.K., as a few we want to get started. And then over the next few days
we want to be able to expand it more broadly, once we confirm that we're
doing what we need to in those places.
But, I mean, this is -- is obviously it's an evolving situation where we'rebuilding this to be adaptive so we change it on a day-to-day basis. Put
different content in from different countries and in different languages.
And this is something that I'm -- I'm basically -- I'm working with our team on
it every day and then I'm talking to different governments and healthorganizations about what they -- the messages that they think are mostimportant to get out there.
It's worth noting that, for localization and translation, some of the content in
there helps sympathize, but I think in general a lot of the stuff that's in there isgoing to be (inaudible) the (inaudible) are (inaudible) those things to makesure that they have -- they have the biggest impact.
And a lot of what we're hearing right now is, it's not necessarily that people
haven't heard the message around social distancing is important, a lot of whatneeds to happen is people just need to be convinced that it's actually important
for them and understand how to -- how to do it.
So, that's not just about writing a quick text message saying, hey, stay athome. I mean, that's -- that is useful from your -- from friends that need toapply some positive social pressure on their -- on the people around them, but
it's probably not the biggest thing that Facebook can do.

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In addition to doing that, I think that by pulling together content from people
who are trusted authorities and public figures, that will probably have a bigger
impact. So, that's a lot of the approach that we're taking. But again, we'll
evolve quickly as we see what works.
Operator:

Our next question is from Casey Newton with Verge. Your line is open.

Casey Newton:

Hey Mark, I'm trying to get a sense of how significant this shift to A.I. formoderation is going to be during this time. Is there any way you can quantify
how much you're going to be leaning on A.I., even in a ballpark way? And
how well positioned are you during this disruption to continuously improve
the A.I.?

Mark Zuckerberg: So, I think varies by content type. If you want to look at this quantitatively,
we've been putting out for at least a few cycles now, this transparency reporton our enforcement.
And basically what we -- what we've been doing is, there's about 20 different
categories of harmful content that we track, everything from counterterrorism
to child exploitation to graphic violence, to incitement of violence. All thesedifferent categories that you can imagine and each one basically requires
somewhat different A.I. work and systems to be trained to find that content.
And we basically hold ourselves accountable. Our goal is to -- is to make it sothat as much of the content as we take down as possible, our systems canidentify proactively before people need to look at it at all.
So, because the time that a -- that someone's flagging it for us, it's -- a bunch apeople have already been exposed it, whereas if our A.I. systems can get it up
front, that's obviously the ideal.
And the gold standard where we've been kind of most advanced and mostproud of our work has probably been in counterterrorism, where we’reconsistently at 98 or 99 percent of the terrorism content that we take down,
our AI systems identify and take down before anyone even sees it, so that’squite good.

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And in a category like that you wouldn’t expect that we’re going to miss toomuch more by – even if we – in the near-term, didn’t have as many people
involved in the process. Over the long-term, of course the training of the AI
system degrades and that will be a bit more of an issue.
But you can basically go through lists of the content types in our report and
see which areas we’re best at proactively, and which ones we are less good at
proactively, and I think it’s fair to assume that our content moderation work –even though the content moderators will generally continue working while athome, I think productivity you should expect to go down.
So I think the overall amount of effort, or force that we can apply to the
problem, I think will be a little bit less on the human side. And that’ll becompounded by the fact that we’re shifting a lot of the focus to things likesuicide and self-injury prevention. So other categories, I think will not only –might have even less focus than they would have before.
You can basically look at those reports and see what we’re more likely to missduring this period, and where there might be relatively less disruption.
Operator:

All right…

Dave Arnold:

Hey everyone, we have time for another couple questions here.

Male:(Inaudible).

Operator:

Our next question…

Dave Arnold:

No, I was just – (inaudible).

Male:

Sorry, go for it.

Dave Arnold:

Was just saying we have time for another couple of questions here.

Operator:

Our next question is from (Sebastian Dumoulin) with (L’Echo), your line isopen.

Facebook, Inc.
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Hello, thank you very much for taking the time. I guess we allreceived our fair share of hoaxes and fake news (in plenty of WhatsApp
groups), and I was wondering if you received any government requests – well
new government requests to lower the encryption levels on WhatsApp tobetter police these?
And is there a point in the pandemic where you could change your mind andhave it (inaudible) differently on the encryption layer (issue or schedule)?
Mark Zuckerberg: Yes, so on this one, encryption levels, I don’t think we’ve seen any heightenedpressure. There is of course the consistent level of pressure applied to us froma number of governments to unwind encryption. But as you know our public
position on this – we’ve been very consistent that we think that this isimportant for privacy and security.
We think that this sort of privacy tool should be the default and should besomething that everyone has access to. So we’ve pushed back a lot on that.
But part of the (inaudible) that we really believe that there are other ways to
get at preventing harm, than by – that there would be more effective thangetting rid of encryption.
So for example in WhatsApp, the biggest step that we’ve taken has just been
making it hard for people to forward content to a lot of people at once,
because we have seen that of the misinformation that spreads, a
disproportionate amount of it is – or at least was – used to be forwarded to a
lot of people at once, they were spread quickly.
And by cutting down on the amount of people who you can forward a
message to at once, adding all the friction there, we significantly reduced thenumber of messages that were sent on WhatsApp, but I think we also had abig dampening affect on misinformation.
We also now put in an indicator in WhatsApp if the content you’re seeing
being forwarded. More recently we added something to see if it’s been highly
forwarded so that way you get a sense that if – and this isn’t just like assumingthat I have sent to one person and then I forwarded it to you. This has been
forwarded in the chain, so you can be extra skeptical of it.

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And then there’s a bunch of work that we’re doing within WhatsApp to workwith fact checkers to get authoritative information out directly.
We fund a number of fact checkers, including we just announced another $1
million program around – specifically around this outbreak, making sure that
we have the support on this, and there’s a bunch of people how basically trackto get a sense of what are the memes that seem to be going public on -- what
are the memes that seem to be going public on WhatsApp, and then theybasically post to their status on WhatsApp or message out to people in groups
to give them the correct information on this.
And there are a bunch of (bots) in groups that we’ve seen health organizations
and governments stand up to make sure that we can get good information out
and correct any memes that are going around that are incorrect as well. We’reworking on a number of more things like this that in partnership with some ofthese health organizations we’ll have more to announce on that soon as well.
Operator:

Our next question is from (Ida Hertskip) from (Solinsky). Your line is open.

(Ida Hertskip):Hello. This is (Ida) from Copenhagen. I have a question concerning the fact
checking medias. If an external fact check media finds that a post spread
untrue health advice about corona, then I know that Facebook marks the post
and links to an article with correct facts. Why don’t you just delete the post?

Mark Zuckerberg: (So there’s) two things that we do. For content that is going to lead to an
imminent risk of physical danger, we take it down. And that’s not just about
misinformation that’s hate speech, that could incite violence, that’s terrorism
content that we worry about.
And for what it’s worth because I know that some of these questions havebeen about political speech, we don’t allow politicians to say this stuff either.
So if a politician is posting something that’s going to incite violence orimminently suppress someone’s voting or right to vote or participate in thecensus or posting dangerous health misinformation, then we’re going to takethat down, too.

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So basically anyone who is saying anything that can create and imminent riskof harm, we take down. Beyond that we have a broader program to stop the
spread of misinformation where postings are being spread, even if it’s notclear that they’re going to cause imminent harm, we just don’t want the mainthings that are going viral or spread on our services to be things that have been
debunked.
So what we do in those cases is we basically apply a discount and make it sothat they don’t spread as far in your news feed, and we attend what a fact
checker has marked as false, and let people go and see what the fact checker
has said about this.
We also for groups where a bunch of misinformation has been reported to be
spread, we removed those groups from recommendation.
So the basic principle here is that you can send -- we allow you to send things
that are wrong if they’re not going to lead to imminent, physical harm, but if
there are -- but we don’t want those to be the main things that are spread, andwe don’t want to be recommending groups that are doing that.
And we want to highlight the right information as much as possible duringthat. I know this is a controversial program, there are folks who thinks thisgoes not far enough, there are folks that think it goes too far.
But I do think it’s worth putting out there, that the program that we’ve stoodup around working with independent fact checkers, and looking through that
content in line, is more advanced than what any other technology company isdoing on this front.
So, so I -- we do a number of things on this overall, I’m quite proud of our
response, both in this coronavirus outbreak, and overall around us, and I think
this is the right balance of how to treat this (inaudible).
Dave Arnold:

Great, thanks Mark. We have time for one more.

Operator:

Our final question is from Julia Boorstin with CNBC.

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Julia Boorstin:

Hi Mark, thanks so much for doing this call, just quickly, I know there’ve
been some reports that accurate articles have been pulled down as you try tohandle misinformation.
Do you have a sense of how much you’re willing to occasionally limit the
spread of accurate articles because you’re relying more on automation to catchmisinformation or how much can we expect you to maybe overcorrect as
result of being really cautious, what can we expect in terms of pulling down
articles moving forward?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yes, thanks for asking about this. I was hoping to get a chance to address this.
So, we -- the incident yesterday, which was the bug in our spam detection
system, it was quite widespread in taking down a number of things that werelegitimate links and marking them as spam, a lot of people saw this issue.
The system is fixed, those posts are back up, and hopefully we won’t have thatissue again anytime soon. That bug was not related to coronavirus, so a lot of
the content that got flagged and ended up being removed for spam yesterday,
it was not just about coronavirus, but of course a lot of people are talking
about coronavirus right now, so a lot of people thought that this had someconnection to that, but it wasn’t that.
Another narrative that I’ve seen that I want to clear up, is a lot of people are
wondering whether that is connected to the shift in how content moderators
are working as they move from home -- to work from home or as we adjust
our system to balance the load there.
And that is also not correct, this is a completely separate system on spam,
spam is one of the areas of content that we take down where these vast, vast
majority, I think it’s like 98 or more percent of the spam content is taken
down by AI systems.
So this is not about any kind of near term change, this was just a technicalerror and we’re still doing the post mortem to understand what happened so
we can – so we can operationalize any learnings from that.

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But I do want to clear up, up front, that this was not because of an approach an
approach on coronavirus and it was not because of a change in approach on
how we’re handling contingent worker’s or any kind of content moderation
strategy around this.
To answer your question about what we might expect going forward, I do
think we will make some false positives that are limited to those strategies
where basically we will in some cases end up taking down some content thatwas not supposed to be taken down.
We try very hard not to do that of course, but I don’t think that we should
expect to see anything of the level of the bug yesterday, which I think wasquite a widespread thing and a number of people saw it.
So hopefully on a day to day basis we’ll make – these, the mistakes that we
make will be capped to individual cases, which hopefully we will be able tohandle and fix on appeals.
Dave Arnold:

Great, thanks Mark and thanks everyone for joining and we’re going to haveto wrap there. Just a reminder before we go, if anyone has any initial follow
up questions pleas email us at press@fb.com and thanks for joining us today.

Mark Zuckerberg: All right everyone, stay healthy and safe and we’ll have more updates soon.
All right, see you.
Operator:

This concludes the Facebook press call, thank you for joining. You may now
disconnect your line.
END