Industry committee  We also raised the concerns that I raised in my opening statement about content moderation and prioritization systems. Essentially, the content Canadians are seeing online—

Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. My name is Rachel Curran and I'm the head of public policy for Meta in Canada. It's a pleasure to address the committee this afternoon. Meta supports risk-based, technology-neutral approaches to the regulation of artificial intelligence. We believe it's important for governments to work together to set common standards and governance models for AI.

Information & Ethics committee  Listen—

Information & Ethics committee  I'm sorry, but the question is not entirely clear. Protect Canadians from what, Ms. Khalid?

Information & Ethics committee  Agreed, and it's to provide credible information on that platform, yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Barrett. We lead the industry in this space. I'm really proud of our work on this front. It's so important. We've developed new technologies to keep this abhorrent abuse off our platforms. In fact, we've removed more than 34 million pieces of child exploitation content from Facebook and Instagram in Q4 of 2022.

Information & Ethics committee  Listen, I talked about some of the new tools and features that we have developed to keep teens safe on our platforms and to address any concerns around safety or mental health. Let me talk about some of the tools we have developed for parents as well. We now have parental tools that let parents and guardians see whom their teen reports or blocks and set blocking hours for when they can use our platforms.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. Look, the most recent research that we have doesn't support the hypothesis that digital technology is behind trends in teen mental health and well-being. The existing body of research doesn't rule out other common factors like economic instability, substance use and academic pressure.

Information & Ethics committee  Maybe I'll turn that over to my colleague, Mr. Gleicher. If he doesn't have the answer, we will get back to the committee in writing.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Gourde. In fact, there is no evidence that any foreign interference or influence operations targeting Canadians during the last election were present on our platforms. For more detail on that, I'm going to turn it over to my colleagues, Mr. Gleicher and Dr.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Gourde. Yes, we'd be happy to set up a protocol with policy-makers specifically to do that. I can tell you that ahead of any election in Canada, we work not only with Elections Canada, but also with Global Affairs and with the Privy Council Office, to make sure we're monitoring and addressing any issues on our platforms, including foreign interference, but we would be happy to set up another or a different protocol with members of Parliament specifically.

Information & Ethics committee  They were, Mr. Gourde. In fact, we found no issues and no problems on our platforms during the last couple of elections, including the one in 2019. We work quite rigorously ahead of those elections, as well as during and afterwards, to monitor for any problems and to remove any problematic content.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm sorry, Monsieur Villemure. I think I missed that question.

Information & Ethics committee  We'd be happy to—

Information & Ethics committee  We remove content that our systems, our reviewers and our moderators identify as sexually explicit. The definition of that, Monsieur Villemure, is set out in our community standards, which are public. We enforce against content according to the definitions set out in our community standards.