November 29, 2017
The Honorable Cedric Richmond
Chairman
Congressional Black Caucus
420 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Chairman Richmond:
I want to thank you and your colleagues of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) for taking the
time to meet with me in Washington last month. It was a difficult but important meeting, and I
appreciate the CBC’s commitment to asking hard questions and holding us accountable for our
progress.
We know that African Americans have been the victims of divisive and abusive content online
and we appreciate the leadership the CBC has shown in speaking out in defense of democratic
values and in favor of more diversity in technology. We take the abuse of our platform and the
lack of representation in our industry very seriously, and we are grateful for your input as we
work through these issues.
In that spirit, I am writing today to respond to a series of recent letters from you and your
colleagues, Representatives Cleaver, Conyers, Ellison, Kelly, and Watson Coleman. These letters
raise a number of questions related to diversity, content and ads, and the ongoing investigation
into Russian election interference. We have compiled our responses below to ensure that all of
your colleagues in the CBC have the opportunity to see and review the work that is already
underway and the steps we plan to take moving forward.
Solving these problems will not happen overnight, but we are committed to addressing and
making progress on the issues raised in our meeting and in these letters. As we work to connect
people and create community, we understand that we must work just as diligently to ensure our
platform is used as a force for good — not as a vehicle for discrimination or division. This
challenge cuts to the heart of our service and our society, and we are committed to getting it
right. Your engagement is an invaluable part of this work. We will continue working with the
CBC, other members of Congress, the administration, and the American people to ensure the
integrity of our elections and the independence of our democracy.
FACEBOOK'S ADVERTISING POLICIES
To begin: we recently published the principles that guide our decision making when it comes to
advertising across Facebook, Messenger and Instagram, including that advertising should be
safe, civil, and non-discriminatory, that control is in the hands of people on our platforms, and
that we do not sell your data.
Many of your questions concerned our policies on ads: how ads are purchased, how they are
reviewed, our efforts to stop discrimination in connection with our ad tools, and our latest
changes with regard to transparency, including around election-related ads. We’re pleased to be
able to address these issues below.

 How our ads work
Facebook generates most of our revenue from selling ads to businesses and other organizations.
Our ad tools enable advertisers to define the audience for their ads based on age, gender,
location, interests, and other criteria. This ability to carefully define audiences is particularly
helpful to small businesses and non-profits who do not have the resources for mass advertising
or television ads. Ads can appear in multiple places on our services, including on Facebook,
Instagram, and Messenger.
The way an advertiser purchases ads on Facebook varies based on their marketing objective,
budget, and the interfaces they prefer to use for advertising. Most advertisers simply access our
self-serve “Ads Manager” tool through their Facebook account and set up an advertising
campaign. When an advertiser creates an ad using Ads Manager, they choose the marketing
objective (e.g., getting people to install its mobile app), the audience they want to see the ad,
the places they want to show the ad (e.g., Facebook or Instagram), and the ad format (e.g., a
single image or a video ad). Advertisers can also turn posts from their Pages into ads, an action
we call “boosting” a post. When an advertiser creates a post on its Facebook Page, they will
sometimes see a “Boost Post” button, which allows the advertiser to quickly create a Facebook
ad using the post.
During and at the end of an ad campaign, we share aggregated information about the
campaign's performance—such as the number of people who saw the ads with the advertiser.
Preventing abuse of ads aimed at multicultural affinity groups
Since 2013, we have given advertisers the option to show ads to people who belong to what we
call “multicultural affinity” groups. These groups (or “segments”) are made up of people whose
activities on Facebook suggest they may be interested in ads related to the African American,
Hispanic American, or Asian American communities.
Multicultural marketing is a common practice in the ad industry. There are many legitimate uses
for this kind of marketing—for example, advertisers may want to reach people with content that
reflects the community with which they identify or products that are highly purchased by a
specific community. Advocacy organizations may want to reach people to provide opportunities,
like telling them about healthcare enrollment.
Last year, we heard concerns—including from members of the CBC—that these advertising
options could be used to discriminate against people in the areas of housing, employment, and
the extension of credit. In response to the CBC and others, and working closely with
Representative Kelly's office and leading civil rights and consumer advocacy organizations, we
developed a series of improvements that would address those concerns by:
• strengthening our policies prohibiting discrimination in advertising
• providing more education to advertisers about their obligation not to discriminate
• prohibiting the use of the multicultural affinity segments to advertise offers of housing,
employment, or credit
• requiring advertisers running ads that offer housing, employment or credit to certify
compliance with our anti-discrimination policy and with applicable law

 As we act to make these changes, we remain on alert to correct errors if and when they arise.
For example, we recently learned that a journalist was able to run ads for apartment rentals that
failed to trigger the protections we put in place around housing ads. We took action
immediately to correct the issue that allowed this to occur.
Going forward, we are determined to do better. Until we can better ensure that our tools will
not be used inappropriately, we are disabling the option that permits advertisers to exclude
multicultural affinity segments from the audience for their ads. In addition, all advertisers will
have to complete the certification described above when they choose to include any of the
multicultural affinity segments. We will also conduct a full review of how exclusion targeting is
being used across audience segments, focusing particularly on potentially sensitive segments
(e.g., segments that relate to the LGBTQ community or to people with disabilities).
We worked in consultation with Representative Kelly on these steps, and we plan to work
closely with the CBC and others to help ensure that our ad targeting tools are used in
compliance with our policies and in a responsible manner.
Working to stop discrimination and divisiveness in connection with ads
We also allow people who use Facebook to fill in their education or employer on their profile,
and advertisers to target on the basis of those education and employment fields. We found a
small percentage of people who have entered offensive responses in these sections in violation
of our policies. To help ensure that targeting is not used for discriminatory purposes, we
clarified our advertising policies and tightened our enforcement processes in an effort to
prevent content that goes against our community standards from being used to target ads. This
includes anything that directly attacks people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin,
religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender or gender identity, or health.
We have also expanded our policy that prohibits shocking content—such as ads depicting
violence or threats of violence, direct threats, and the promotion of the sale or use of
weapons—to prevent ads that use even more subtle expressions of violence.
Strengthening ads review
Before any ad can appear on Facebook or Instagram, it must go through our ad review process.
We rely on both automated and manual review, and we’re taking aggressive steps to strengthen
both. The process includes automated checks of an ad’s images, text, targeting, and positioning,
in addition to the content on the ad’s Facebook and landing pages. Our automated systems also
flag content for human review.
Reviewing ads means assessing not just what’s in an ad, but also the context in which it was
bought and the intended audience—so we’re changing our ads review system to pay more
attention to these signals. We’re adding more than 1,000 people to our global ads review teams
over the next year and simultaneously working to hire more people from African American and
Hispanic communities. This will help increase the diversity of our workforce and improve our
understanding and awareness of ads that are meant to exploit culturally sensitive issues. In
addition, we are investing more in machine learning to better understand when to flag and take
down ads.

 Providing more transparency in ads
Facebook is firmly committed to transparency in political advertising. As the Federal Election
Commission contemplates requiring disclaimers in online political ads, we submitted comments
in support of such efforts. And as Congress considers ad transparency legislation, we stand
ready to work with lawmakers.
We are also undertaking our own efforts to bring more transparency to advertising on
Facebook. This month, we began testing a feature that allows people to view all the ads a Page
is running on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger—even if they are not the intended target
audience for the ad. All Pages will eventually be part of this effort, and we will require that all
ads be associated with a Page as part of the ad creation process. We have started this test in
Canada and expect to roll it out to the United States by next summer, ahead of the U.S. midterm
elections in November 2018.

During this initial test, we will only show active ads. However, when this feature is rolled out in
the United States, it will include a growing archive so that people can see both current and
historic federal election-related ads. This archive will ultimately go back 4 years (the time period
proposed by the Honest Ad Act for covered ads). In addition, for each federal election-related
ad, we will:
• include the ad in a searchable archive that will ultimately cover a rolling four-year period
• provide details on the total amounts spent
• provide the number of times we show an ad
• provide demographic information (i.e. age, general location, gender) about the audience
that the ad reached
We try to catch content that shouldn’t be on Facebook before it surfaces on the platform, but
because this is not always possible, we also take action when people report ads that violate our
policies. We hope that more transparency will mean more people can report inappropriate ads.
Beyond these steps, we’re also updating our policies to require advertisers who want to run U.S.
federal election-related ads to verify the identity of the business or organization they represent.
As part of this documentation process, advertisers will be required to identify that they are
running election-related advertising and verify both their entity and location.
Once verified, these advertisers will be required to include a disclosure in their election-related
ads. When people click on the disclosure, they will be able to see details about the advertiser.
Like other ads on Facebook, they will also be able to see an explanation of why they saw that
particular ad.
Protecting against foreign interference and malicious use of Facebook ads
Facebook recognizes the extraordinary nature of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election
and we are cooperating fully with the ongoing congressional investigations. We believe that the
public deserves a full accounting of the facts, and that congressional investigators are best
positioned to deliver that based on all the information to which they have access, including what
Facebook has provided. Should congressional committees elect to release the content provided
by Facebook, we stand ready to support their efforts by helping to redact any personally
identifying information and addressing any other privacy considerations.

 We have provided all of the Russian ads we identified as part of our internal investigation—
along with all of the targeting and payment information and the relevant Page and Instagram
posts—to the committees prior to the public hearings. And our investigation continues to this
day.
All of the ads that Russia’s Internet Research Agency ran during the 2016 U.S. election cycle
were run by accounts engaged in coordinated inauthentic activity, which is against Facebook's
policies. Going forward, all of the efforts discussed here are designed to prevent a repeat of
such abuse, including to catch malicious actors faster and to prevent or quickly take down the
content put up by such coordinated inauthentic activity. Even if we eliminated all such abuse of
our platform, there would still be political and social content that is controversial and that I, and
others in leadership positions at Facebook, would find deeply offensive – but that we would not
take down due to this nation's commitment to free expression and robust debate. Accordingly,
in addition to the steps we have taken to increase enforcement of our content policies, we
believe that it is equally important that we work collaboratively with the government and our
peer companies to detect and deter inauthentic behavior by foreign actors.
Additionally, based on feedback we heard from the CBC and others, we will unveil a feature by
the end of this year that will allow people to learn which Internet Research Agency Facebook
and Instagram accounts and pages they may have liked or followed between January 2015 and
August 2017. This tool is one of a number of transparency initiatives we are undertaking as a
company.
Finally, we are making a number of investments and changes to protect our platform from the
kind of abuse we saw in the 2016 U.S. election cycle, including adding more than 10,000 people
to work on safety and security by the end of 2018, and requiring additional documentation and
disclosures from political advertisers.
FACEBOOK CONTENT POLICY
Community Standards
With regard to organic content on Facebook, we have a set of policies – our Community
Standards – that explain what is and isn't allowed on the platform. The goal of our Standards is
to encourage expression and create a safe and respectful community.
We are constantly evaluating – and, where necessary, iterating on – our content policies to
account for shifts in cultural and social norms around the world. For example, we recently
updated our hate speech policies to remove violent speech directed at groups of people defined
by protected characteristics, even if the basis for the attack may be ambiguous. Under the
previous hate speech policy, a direct attack targeting women on the basis of gender, for
example, would have been removed from Facebook, but the same content directed at women
drivers would have remained on the platform. We have come to see that this distinction is a
mistake, and we no longer differentiate between the two forms of attack when it comes to the
most violent hate speech. We continue to explore how we can adopt a more granular approach
to hate speech, both in the way we draft our policies and the way we enforce on them.

 Our Community Standards also apply to Facebook Live video. If we learn of someone violating
our Community Standards while using Live, we will interrupt that stream. Viewers can report
potential violations during a Live broadcast, and we work hard to address reports quickly. We
also monitor Live videos that are being seen and shared by a high volume of people, even if they
are not reported to us. In May, we announced that we would be hiring 3,000 people to our
Community Operations team to review the millions of reports we get every week and improve
the process for doing it quickly. That hiring is now complete, bringing our Community
Operations team around the world to 7,500 people. To increase the cultural competency of our
content reviewers, we specifically retained a vendor committed to employing a diverse
workforce and with experience operating in locations with significant ethnic diversity.
In addition to investing in more people, we're building better technology and tools to keep our
community safe. Automation helps us collate the millions of reports we get each week by
recognizing duplicates, so that if 1,000 people report a piece of content, we don't have 1,000
people reviewing the same piece of content. We also use automation to make sure we quickly
get reports to reviewers who have the right subject matter or language expertise. We have
made it simpler for people to report problems to us, faster for our reviewers to determine which
posts violate our standards and easier for them to contact law enforcement if someone needs
help. As a result of these investments in our live review capabilities, we are now able to better
proactively detect and accelerate reports that require immediate attention. For instance, in the
case of live videos depicting suicide and self-harm, we're able to escalate these to local
authorities twice as quickly as other reports.
Determining whether a particular comment is hateful often depends on context, so automation
primarily serves to assist when it comes to manual review and enforcement of reported content.
As technology improves, we continue to explore new ways that automation can help us more
effectively enforce our policies and make the platform safer.
DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION AT FACEBOOK
A diverse workforce is crucial for our company and our industry, and while we have made
progress, we recognize that we have to do more. To demonstrate our commitment, we began
publicly reporting our workforce diversity statistics annually in 2014 to ensure accountability.
The top line trend data is that both our hiring rates and our overall representation of
traditionally underrepresented people (a result of both hiring and retention) have increased
over the past three years, with most improvement being in non-technical fields. The number of
African Americans at the company overall has increased by a factor of five since 2014, and our
percentage of African Americans in non-technical roles has increased from two percent to six
percent. While this improvement represents real progress, as I said above, both Facebook and
the tech industry as a whole has a long way to go on hiring, representation in leadership, and
strengthening the pipeline for women and minorities to fill more jobs in the tech industry.
While you may be familiar with our efforts from reading our annual diversity report, below are
details on some of our short, medium and long-term initiatives. Our partnerships with minorityfocused organizations have helped us build relationships, and we will continue to invest in these
and many other efforts as we push for greater diversity.

 Short term: Hiring computer scientists and computer engineers and providing an inclusive
workplace
Given the variety of disciplines within STEM, and Facebook's particular focus on computer
science and computer engineering (CS&E), we partner with many institutions and groups for
hiring, including the National Society of Black Engineers whose membership includes CS&E
graduates. We’re also working with a number of Historically Black Colleges and Universities
(HBCUs) to develop and hire talented individuals in both technical and non-technical disciplines.
Our efforts in non-technical hiring have outperformed those in the technical realm, leading us to
invest heavily in building talent partnerships for technical talent and being as transparent as
possible on the skills and experience we seek. With only eight percent of STEM graduates in the
U.S. studying computer science, we not only have an interest in hiring as many as we can today,
but in investing for the future.
We recently hosted our annual HBCU Faculty Summit at our headquarters in Menlo Park to help
faculty members better understand our technical interview process, as well as the typical
Facebook intern experience. Beyond our own Summit, we partner with the United Negro
College Fund (UNCF) on their HBCU Innovation Summit, and have agreed to design the advanced
software engineering online coursework track for participating HBCUs. Three weeks ago, we
hosted 30 faculty members from 21 different HBCUs to discuss innovative approaches to
computer science curriculum design and career pathways into engineering and analytics in the
tech industry.
We know that all our efforts to bring currently underrepresented people in to the company
would be fruitless if we don't maintain an inclusive culture where both equity and equality are
the norm. All of our employees, including our engineers, policy developers, and content
moderators, undergo training to help address and manage implicit bias. After receiving positive
feedback on our Managing Bias training, we produced a version of this course for free, public
use so that any company that was interested in addressing bias in its own workforce could have
the benefit of this training without the cost or burden of producing one themselves. The session
can be found online at https://managingbias.fb.com/ and has been viewed and used thousands
of times in a wide array of companies and industries.
We want a workforce that reflects the range of perspectives, experiences and identities of those
we hope to serve, and our partnerships with professional organizations, like Black MBA Women
and Management Leadership for Tomorrow, are helping us make progress toward that goal.
Medium Term: Supporting university students with an interest in tech
To increase transparency and build skills in the specific aspects of computer science and
engineering that are a focus in our hiring, we partner with Google on the Engineer in Residence
Program where Facebook software engineers teach at Morgan State University. As visiting
professors, our engineers teach “Data Structures and Algorithms,” a computer science subject
that is most in demand at companies like Facebook. In addition to training faculty to administer
this class at Morgan State, we build in comprehensive professional development along with
coursework, opportunities for networking, and added mentorship for students. The students
also receive the benefit of having a Facebook employee on staff and available to help coach
them through the interview process for a summer internship. We have extended this “Engineer
in Residence” program to other HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), and we share
information with participating companies in order to leverage our joint learnings and

 investments.
This year, we are also running a ten-week interview prep workshop at Facebook New York with
students from CUNY, Cornell Tech, NYU, NJIT and Rutgers. We're working closely with NYC Tech
Talent Pipeline, which is funded by the New York City Mayor's office and aims to double the
number of graduates with tech degrees by 2022.
In 2013 we launched the pilot class of Facebook University (FBU), a minority-geared training
program. FBU was created in recognition of the fact that the earlier students are exposed to
both hard technical training and soft workplace navigation skills, the more successful they are
likely to be. Building on the success of that first summer class of 30 students, we have now
grown FBU to classes in the range of 200 students a year and have graduated more than 500
students from the program. Understanding that the opportunities for roles in non-technical
functions are as attractive as technical roles to many students, we have expanded FBU beyond
engineering to analytics, sales, product design and business operations.
As part of our Facebook Academy initiative, a six-week summer internship program for local
teens, we have enrolled 100 high school students from our local communities since 2012. We’ve
also hired an economic opportunities manager at our headquarters to help connect our local
residents to job opportunities at Facebook and with our vendors.
Long Term: Expanding Opportunity and Access
We are also proud of our Computer Science Education (CS Edu) and Social & Emotional Learning
(SEL) skills and resources partnerships and programs. We have CS Edu partnerships and
programs with Code.org and the College Board, among others. Through these partnerships we
have trained over 1,250 new teachers in AP Computer Science nationwide, and we have set a
goal of enrolling 27,000 underrepresented students in Computer Science in 2017-2018. In Illinois
and California, we engaged 650 new learners, 80 educators and 20 internal representatives. We
are also working to engage learners, educators, and internal representatives in Texas and New
York. All four states are priority U.S. markets for our programs in the second half of this year. In
addition, we have had CS Edu workshops that brought together approximately 200 education,
youth and community action leaders to address school climate/SEL needs at the Connecting
Communities of Courage Summit which was held in partnership with the National School
Climate Center. We are also launching an 8-week student coding pilot program with the Harlem
Children’s Zone in New York. The goal is to incentivize and reward underrepresented minority
students in 5th through 9th grade to develop computer science-related skills.
In 2015, Facebook launched our TechPrep website—our own national outreach effort to expose
underrepresented minority communities to computer programming. TechPrep is a free online
resource hub available in both English and Spanish to help parents, guardians, and students of
all ages explore computer programming, the jobs available to programmers, and the skills
required to become one. We’ve had more than one million unique users across all 50 states
since our launch in October 2015. We brought TechPrep to cities across the country in a road
show during the summer of 2016, including events with Representatives Butterfield, Davis and
Lee in their respective districts. We set a goal of reaching 200,000 new unique TechPrep users
this year, and have currently reached 182,000. We continue to optimize the program based on
community feedback.

 We recognize that although we’ve made progress toward diversity, there is much more work to
do toward ensuring that our workforce, management and board are reflective of the people and
communities we serve. To that end, we greatly appreciate the ideas, suggestions and feedback
we have received from the CBC, and are committed to continuing to work with you to improve
diversity in our company and our sector.
SUPPORTING COMMUNITY
Economic Opportunity
Facebook is committed to increasing economic opportunity both on and off our platform. Since
2011, we’ve partnered with Year Up to provide training and internships to young adults from
communities of color. Facebook has hired 54 Year Up alumni to fulfill contract or full-time
positions. We have hosted 167 interns in 3 markets (Bay Area, New York, and Seattle) across 6
training specialties: IT Helpdesk, Project Coordination, Business Operations, Quality Assurance,
Cyber Security and Data Analytics/Business Intelligence.
In 2017, we partnered with a local workforce development organization, JobTrain, to support its
Construction Pre-Apprenticeship Program. Through its Local Priority Hiring Initiative, JobTrain is
encouraging contractors and subcontractors working on our headquarters expansion to hire
apprentices from our surrounding communities that have graduated from the program.
We have also trained over 6,000 African American owned small businesses through our Boost
Your Business program, which helps small businesses use online tools to grow. We’ve partnered
with both the U.S. Black Chambers, Inc. and the National Black Chamber of Commerce to reach
even more African American business owners. We have relationships with a number of coding
organizations focused on growing African American representation in tech such as Black Girls
Code, All Star Code, Hack the Hood, The Hidden Genius Project, Level Playing Field Institute, Yes
We Code, Streetcode Academy, Dev Color, Dev Bootcamp, and Techbridge.
We know we have both the ability and the responsibility to create economic opportunity and
promote equality outside of our company. We continue to grow our supplier diversity program,
and earlier this year we implemented billing guidelines for law firms that provide Facebook with
outside counsel. The expectation for law firms is that 33% of outside counsel teams staffed
across all Facebook matters should be comprised of women and minorities. We have made it
clear that the women and minorities who are staffed on Facebook matters should be given clear
and measurable leadership opportunities—for example, they should serve as a relationship
manager, make significant contributions in the courtroom or on deals, and so on.
Addressing housing shortages and creating economic opportunity in the Bay Area
Our headquarters in Menlo Park is adjacent to three of the lowest income communities of color
in Silicon Valley. Last year we announced a new partnership with Envision Transform Build and
the cities of East Palo Alto and Menlo Park to create regional solutions to the affordable housing
crisis, seeded with a $20 million contribution from Facebook. The partnership is starting with the
creation of more affordable housing, since this is what our neighbors have told us their
community needs most urgently.

 The partnership is built on three initial pillars:
Affordable Housing: A $75 million Catalyst Housing Fund, starting with an $18.5 million
contribution from Facebook, will help ensure people from different means can continue to live
and thrive in Silicon Valley. Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) will manage this fund in
collaboration with Housing Trust Silicon Valley. The Catalyst Housing Fund will pursue innovative
and scalable ways to increase the production and protection of affordable housing. An
additional $250,000 will go to Rebuilding Together Peninsula to support the building and upkeep
of homes for low-income residents.
Economic Opportunity: The partnership will devote $625,000 to job training in the science,
technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. We have also hired a dedicated local
community liaison who will help connect community members with open positions at Facebook.
Legal Support: Since the announcement of the community partnership last December, the
partners have provided $500,000 to Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto (CLSEPA) to
support Belle Haven and East Palo Alto residents threatened with displacement from evictions
or abuse by landlords.
We see the need for policy and funding solutions to work in tandem, and we know we can’t
solve these issues by working alone. This unique coalition is comprised of initial partners that
share our goals, including Youth United for Community Action, Faith in Action Bay Area,
Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto, Comité de Vecinos del Lado Oeste – East Palo Alto,
the local governments of East Palo Alto and Menlo Park, and other community groups.
We work in many ways to keep our local neighborhoods strong, including donating to local nonprofit organizations and creating educational programs and housing initiatives that our
neighbors tell us are very important to them. The Facebook Local Community Fund has donated
$750,000 to more than 75 organizations serving the Menlo Park, Belle Haven and East Palo Alto
communities. We have also committed to building mixed-income housing, including 225 below
market rate units, on our campus.
DEVELOPING TOOLS TO INCREASE CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
Since 2008, Facebook has developed tools to help people engage politically and express their
civic voice. The types of products we have launched during elections show people how to
register to vote, when and where to vote, what is on their ballot, and where candidates and
parties stand on the issues. For example, our efforts in 2016 helped nearly 2 million people
register to vote, and we are making it easier for people to find, follow, and contact their elected
representatives at all levels of government.
In addition to keeping individuals informed, Facebook has developed tools to combat
misinformation and fraud. We remove content that tries to deceive and disenfranchise voters;
in 2016, we removed content that promoted false voting dates and times.

 We have also developed post-election tools to make it simple for people to connect with their
newly-elected representatives. Through our Town Hall feature, people can find their
representatives and choose to follow them on Facebook.
Finally, we make it easier for elected officials to connect with their communities. We have
created constituent badges to help representatives see if commenters on their posts are
constituents. This product ties directly into our insight and targeting features and helps elected
officials hear directly from their constituents about the issues that matter most to them.
FACEBOOK DATA USE POLICY
Law enforcement and criminal activity
People who use Facebook can control who can see the information and content they share by
selecting the audience for each of their posts. When people choose to share information
publicly, that information can be viewed by anyone with access to the Internet.
We disclose user data to law enforcement in accordance with our Data Use Policy and applicable
law, including the federal Stored Communications Act. Law enforcement has to obtain a valid
subpoena connected to an official criminal investigation to compel the disclosure of basic
subscriber records, which may include name, length of service, credit card information, email
address, and recent login/logout IP address, if available. A court order is required to compel the
disclosure of certain additional records or information pertaining to an account, such as
message headers and IP addresses. To obtain non-public account content, such as messages,
photos, videos, timeline posts, and location information, law enforcement must demonstrate
probable cause and obtain a search warrant issued under the procedures described in the
Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, or equivalent state warrant procedures. We interpret the
“national security letter” provision as applied to Facebook to require the production of only two
categories of information: name and length of service.
Federal and state law set the requisite evidentiary thresholds and definitions for valid legal
process from law enforcement authorities. Facebook does not comply with unlawful demands
to provide data. Such requests may be inadequate because they are based on invalid legal
process, are overly broad, or for other reasons. Facebook does not collect ethnic data related to
requests from law enforcement authorities or related to proactive sharing of information with
law enforcement, consistent with the terms of our Data Use Policy.
***
As a company on whose platform the Black Lives Matter movement and many others were
started, we know firsthand how important voice, understanding and cultural competence are in
achieving our mission to give people the power to build strong communities. We will continue
to work in partnership with individuals, organizations, and industry peers towards this end.

 Thank you once again for our meeting. It was a powerful reminder of how valuable engagement
with the CBC is and will continue to be. We look forward to continuing to work with all of you to
ensure Facebook is a force for good for communities here and around the world.

Respectfully,

Sheryl Sandberg'
Chief Operating Officer
Facebook, Inc

 

Address: 1 Hacker Way
Menlo Park, CA 94025

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