Our Progress Addressing Challenges and Innovating Responsibly – Investor Relations

How technology companies grapple with complex issues is being heavily scrutinized, and often, without important context. There is a lot more to the story. What is getting lost in this discussion is some of the important progress weve made as a company and the positive impact that it is having across many key areas.

We firmly believe that ongoing research and candid conversations about our impact are some of the most effective ways to identify emerging issues and get ahead of them. This doesnt mean we find and fix every problem right away. But because of this approach, together with other changes, we have made significant progress across a number of important areas, including privacy, safety and security, to name a few. Just as the world has changed a lot, so has Facebook.

In the past, we didnt address safety and security challenges early enough in the product development process. Instead, we made improvements reactively in response to a specific abuse. But we have fundamentally changed that approach. Today, we embed teams focusing specifically on safety and security issues directly into product development teams, allowing us to address these issues during our product development process, not after it. Products also have to go through an Integrity Review process, similar to the Privacy Review process, so we can anticipate potential abuses and build in ways to mitigate them. Here are a few examples of how far weve come.

Some of the most important changes weve made in recent years have been in prioritizing safety and security. As a result:

We have also changed our approach to protecting peoples privacy as a company. This includes investing in and expanding our Privacy Checkup, which today is used by tens of millions of people every month to manage their settings and control their experience on Facebook, and launching tools like Off-Facebook Activity and Why Am I Seeing This? that show people how their information is used and let them more easily manage settings.

Misinformation has been a challenge on and off the internet for many decades. People are understandably concerned about how it will be handled for future internet technologies. At Facebook, weve begun addressing this comprehensively rather than treating it as a single problem with a single solution. This means weve gotten better at addressing this complex challenge. Weve worked to develop and expand our systems to reduce misinformation and promote reliable information. As a result:

Most importantly, weve also changed not just what we build but how we build so that when we launch new products, they are more likely to have effective privacy, security and safety protections already built in. For example:

You can read more about the direction of our responsible innovation efforts from Margaret Stewart, VP of Product Design & Responsible Innovation at Facebook.

Yes, weve made progress. But we also know that there will always be examples of things we miss and things we take down by mistake. There is no perfect here. Collaborating with experts, policymakers and others has made us better, and continued collaboration will be key to making sure our progress continues. And thats our plan.

Read more about our efforts on our new page, which features updated information and figures, to give a sense of where things have improved and where we still have more work to do. Our Transparency Center is also a comprehensive destination for our integrity and transparency efforts. Also, see a timeline of our integrity efforts since 2016.

For more, visit about.facebook.com/progress.

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Our Progress Addressing Challenges and Innovating Responsibly - Investor Relations