Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg: 'We have a lot of hard work to do preventing harm'

I think one of the questions people have for us right now is we're making such big investments in safety and security. Can we make those investments while people continue to use our products and while we continue to grow our business? And I think this quarter shows that we can do both. Now we still have a lot of hard work ahead of us, but I think this shows that we can make progress across multiple fronts. So what was driving that upside though? Was it a higher ad load? Was it better targeting? How did you manage to grow the average revenue per user so significantly? Well, we're seeing growth in the community. We're seeing a very nice and consistent engagement. It's worth noting that even as we've grown the Facebook user community, the same percentage are coming back every day because Facebook's part of their daily lives. We've increased ad load over the last couple of years, but nothing that important this quarter. And we've done a good job, I think, making the ads more relevant to people while protecting people's privacy. And I think that's something that we need to do a better job understanding. People worry that if our business model is advertising, we can't protect people's privacy at the same time. And we do, and we can. We don't sell data. We don't tell advertisers who people are. But we can use that information to show people things they're interested in, which is better for people and is growing our business. So your outlook, though, is that growth is going to continue to decelerate in the coming quarters this year. How much of that is about overhang when it comes to privacy? Are you concerned about advertisers or users having some sort of impact from some of the issues in the past year, the various scandals? Well, our community growth shows that people continue to use our products, and we haven't seen meaningful trends in advertisers. But that said, what this quarter also shows is that we have a lot of hard work to do in preventing harm on our platform. And if you want to know what a company cares about, you look at where it spends its money, and you see us investing billions a year against election interference to have the right content on Facebook and protect people's privacy. And we are going to continue to make those investments. But I think we will continue to have very healthy growth in the business as well. But if advertisers and users have not, at least in the past quarter, pulled back as a result of these data and privacy issues, should we be concerned that you don't have financial incentives to really protect the platform? Well, if you look at our growth rates this quarter, revenue was up 30 percent and expenses were up 62 percent. And if you look at our projections going forward, we're going to continue for expenses to outpace, and that's hitting our profitability. And what that means is that we believe very deeply that this is important. I also think that the incentives are aligned here. It is in our not just long-term but short-term business interest for people to feel safe and secure on our platform. And that's certainly the environment advertisers want to be. So I don't think there's a tension between these things. I think we're doing the right thing, investing in the business to protect people. And that will, over the long run, be good for people and good for the business. So today, Facebook's under fire for paying users to download an app to track their behavior on their mobile devices, an app whose rights Apple just revoked. Why would you have this kind of app out there after trying to do so much to protect the data of your users? So I want to be clear what this is. This is a Facebook research app. It's very clear to the people who participate in it. It's completely opt-in. There is a rigorous consent flow and people are compensated. It's a market research program. Now, that said, we know we have work to do to make sure people's data is protected. It's your information. You put it on Facebook. You need to know what's happening. In this case, the people that chose to participate in this program did, but we definitely have work to do. And we've done it. We're going to continue to do it. So you look at the GDPR flows. That was mandated in Europe. But we're not waiting for regulation in the rest of the world, even though we're supportive. We took similar flows and made those available all over the world. And so the steps we need to take to make sure people understand how their information is used are a very important investment we're going to keep making. Do you wish you had pulled that app earlier instead of just waiting until Apple pulled its rights? Well, of course, as long as soon as we realized we weren't in compliance with the rules on their platform, we pulled it. The important thing is that the people involved in that research project knew they were involved and consented. Now, in terms of regulation, following all these headlines about the Apple app, Senator Warner sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter. You have representatives of Ocasio-Cortez, as well as Ro Khanna, raising concerns about both privacy and antitrust. It seems like there is a broader concern about regulation now than ever before. How much of a distraction and a cost will these new specters of regulation be for Facebook and for you trying to run the business? Again, I think these things are much more aligned than people understand. We want people to know that they're protected. We are very supportive of regulation, including comprehensive federal privacy-led regulation in the U.S., but we're also not waiting for it, doing things like the GDPR flows, building ads transparency, even for bills that haven't yet passed. But these things are aligned. It is in our interests to protect our community. It is in our interest to make sure people understand how their information is being used, and it's in our interest to work with governments around the world. We're going to continue to do that. Just a final question about election manipulation. There are more elections coming up all the time. Just yesterday, U.S. intel chiefs testified that China and Russia are still trying to manipulate users on the platform. Are you doing enough? Can you prevent manipulation? Well, we are certainly focused there. If you saw our election war room and the things we were able to do in the 2018 election, not just in the U.S., but around the world. And so they're right that people will try to manipulate elections and people will try it to do it on our platform and others. And that means we need to stay one step ahead. One thing that was great in the last election was just the increased cooperation, the relationship we have with U.S. law enforcement, law enforcement around the world. And as we head towards the EU elections and elections around the world, that's something we're going to duplicate. Can you guarantee there'll be no more manipulation on the platform? Well, we can guarantee that we're going to do everything we can to prevent harm. We also have a community of two billion plus, 2.7 billion users. And that means that people are going to continue to try to do things. We're going to see the great things the world does and some of the harm. But here's what we've learned over the last year. We've learned that we need a different approach to running our company, that we need to put so much effort into preventing the harm so that that harm, which is done by small people, but risks drowning out the good. Because what we see every day on Facebook, and I think this quarter shows people see, are people connecting and sharing and using a product that matters in their lives. And we need to protect that experience. Cheryl Sandberg, we appreciate you taking the time to talk to us here at Facebook headquarters. Guys, back over to you.