We were slow to identify Russian interference: Mark Zuckerberg admits in European Parliament

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg answers questions on Tuesday from the European Parliament in Brussels on a massive data leak affecting millions of users.

Below please find his opening remarks.

Europeans make up a large and incredibly important part of our global community. Many of the values that Europeans care about deeply are values we share: from the importance of human rights and the need for community to the love of technology and all the potential that it can bring.

We've always focused on all the good that technology and connecting people can bring. As Facebook is growing, it has helped give people everywhere around the world new tools to stay connected to the people they care about most.

After the recent terrorist attacks in Berlin and Paris, London and here in Brussels, tens of thousands of people have used our safety check tool to tell the people the love that they are safe.

Refugees arriving in Europe are using Facebook to stay in touch with their loved ones back home and find new communities here.

There are 18 million small businesses here in Europe that use Facebook today, mostly for free. Almost half of whom say that they have hired more people as a result of our tools.

But it's also become clear over the last couple of years that we haven't done enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. And that goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and developers misusing people's information.

We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility and that was a mistake. And I am sorry for it.

It's going to take time to work through all the changes that we need to make here. But I'm committed to getting this right and to making the significant investments that are necessary to make people safe.

For example, we are doubling the number of people working on safety and security at our company to more than 20 thousand by the end of this year.
On top of the investments we are making in other areas, I expect that these increased investments in security will significantly impact our profitability.

But I want to be clear - keeping people safe will always be more important than maximising our profits.
In less than 18 months there are important elections...

In 2016, we were too slow to identify Russian interference on Facebook in the U.S presidential election. At the time, we were more focused on more traditional kinds of cyber attacks like phishing and malware.

We weren't prepared enough for the coordinated misinformation operations that we are now aware of. Since then, we've made significant operations to protect the integrity of elections by making these kinds of attacks much harder to do on Facebook.

I have more confidence that we are getting this right going forward because we've already a better job in several important elections since 2016, including the French presidential election, the German elections and the Alabama special election in the U.S. last year.

We're working with governments and other technology companies about threats in real time. For example in Germany, before the 2017 elections, we worked directly with the German federal office for information security.

We're also using new technology including AI to remove fake accounts that are responsible for much of the false news, misinformation and bad adds that people can see on Facebook. In the run-up to the 2017 french presidential election, our systems found and took down more than 30,000 fake accounts.

And in the Alabama special election in the US, we were able to proactively detect and remove fake accounts from Macedonia who were trying to spread disinformation.

We're making the advertising on Facebook much more transparent.

We're committed to continue to invest heavily to improve out technique to make sure we stay ahead.

We are very committed to Europe.

By the end of 2018, Facebook will employ 10,000 people across European countries.

My priority has always been our social mission... I believe deeply in what we are doing.