Meta Ireland chief Anne O’Leary: ‘We need to work together across the tech industry ... so we keep people safe online’

The past few weeks have been busy for Meta Ireland chief Anne O’Leary. The company has officially opened its new campus-style European headquarters in Dublin, a major milestone for the social media giant.

The project been five years in the making, with the company confirming in November 2018 that it would move to the Dublin 4 location.

The new building is everything you would expect from a born-on-the-web company. Inspirational quotes adorn the walls (“Happy spaces make happy faces”). There is plenty of access to outdoor space and rooftop gardens, even in the tallest office blocks. There is a giant chessboard in one garden that staff can use. The interview rooms are named after uniquely Irish subjects; on this occasion, the interview is being conducted in the Roy Keane meeting room, a deliberate choice by Cork-born O’Leary. The campus even has its own bees producing honey for the building.

But it has been a year of turbulence for the tech company. The Bank Centre, the former site of AIB’s headquarters in Ballsbridge, was initially intended to be a massive campus for a growing company. But with a smaller workforce – Meta cut more than 500 jobs in recent months – plus the pandemic-fuelled shift to remote working, plans were scaled back a little. While Meta has occupied four office blocks in the rear of the campus, it is planning to sublet Fibonacci Square, almost 35,000sq m of office space on the site. That is, O’Leary says, unless Meta Ireland decides to expand further.

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When O’Leary left Vodafone in June 2022 to become vice-president of Meta’s mid-market business division for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, it was a chance for a new challenge. That was stepped up the following April, when then head of Meta Ireland Rick Kelley announced he would leave the Irish job, and O’Leary was named as his successor. She now carries out that job alongside her role as vice-president of Meta’s EMEA mid-market global business group.

You could wonder if that had been the plan all along – one eye on the top Irish job. But O’Leary dismisses that. “Opportunities come up. Things change within companies. I came in to do that role of VP of Europe, Middle East and Africa, learning the business, the people, the culture, the business,” she says. “But obviously I was always open to new opportunities that evolve within a company. I was in a few months and the head of Ireland role came up due to changes that were made in the company.”

That means overseeing not only the team in Dublin, but also Reality Labs in Cork and the data centre in Clonee.

“Hopefully I can bring a lot of the learnings as CEO of Vodafone to that. thoroughly enjoying it, because it’s kind of like a new phase, moving to this office. For me and for Meta in Ireland, that was the kind of a restart, a relaunch and look into the future for Meta in Ireland.”

Meta has much it would be keen to put in the rear-view mirror. A year ago, the company announced it would lay-off 11,000 workers globally, part of chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency” that would get the company back on track. About 350 of those would go in Ireland. But there was more to come. A second round followed in March 2023, with a further 10,000 staff let go globally. This time the impact was a bit more severe at Meta Ireland; more than 500 staff were cut by May. It now employs about 2,000 people directly here.

In the first few days [after Hamas’s October 7th attacks on Israel] we removed or marked as disturbing more than 795,000 pieces of content for violating policies in Hebrew and Arabic

O’Leary is hopeful that the large-scale job losses are at an end. The most recent set of figures for Meta Platforms showed the company beat expectations for third-quarter profits, with revenue up 23 per cent to $34.15 billion (€31.93 billion). The number of people using its apps daily grew by 7 per cent. In the past year, the company’s shares have more than doubled.

The resurgence in its fortunes can be traced back to the hype around emerging AI technology, a recovery in digital advertising and its aggressive austerity drive that trimmed costs. It has invested in innovation too: the Quest 3 headset, its partnership with Ray-Ban on smart glasses, and development in advertising. Soon, there will be a subscription option for users that will eliminate advertising on Meta’s platforms for a monthly fee. Meta is, O’Leary says, very much looking to the future.

“It’s certainly been a challenging year, there’s no doubt about that. We lost passionate, talented and capable individuals, and that’s hard for everyone,” she says. “I would say for any person in leadership there are challenging years and challenging moments. And our role is to step up and to lead through the good times and the challenging times. But I’m certainly very excited about the future. We’re leaner, we’re more efficient. We’re fit for the future.”

That future could also include higher costs and regulatory pressures next year. The latter is likely to come on different fronts. Not only has Meta had some high-profile tussles with data protection regulators, it is also facing a more pressing problem: disinformation. Already it has been called on by the European Commission – along with other social media platforms – to outline what steps it has taken to deal with disinformation on the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Meta has already responded to the commission, O’Leary says.

“We have a well-established process for identifying and mitigating risks during a crisis while also protecting expression. We quickly established a special operations centre staffed with experts, including fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers. They have been working around the clock to closely monitor and respond to this situation,” O’Leary says. “I know in the first few days of the attacks we removed or marked as disturbing more than 795,000 pieces of content for violating these policies in Hebrew and Arabic.”

The platform has teams working around the clock to take action on content that violates its policies or local law, she says. They also co-ordinate with third-party fact-checkers to limit the spread of misinformation.

Trying to keep balance is an ongoing task. There are 112 nationalities at Meta Ireland, some of which have been affected by ongoing events on the world stage. The company withdrew from this year’s Web Summit following controversial social media posts by former chief executive Paddy Cosgrave. “We felt it wasn’t appropriate to send speaker this year. It is a very sensitive time. People are very bruised directly – employees, their families. We decided, like other companies, not to have a speaker there. We have no other decisions made on anything else to do with it.”

In the meantime, O’Leary points to the good for which Meta’s platform has been used: raising more than $11.5 million through Facebook and Instagram for non-profits helping with the relief efforts in the region.

Still, the company is facing more challenges. With US elections looming, the spotlight will be once more turned on how social media platforms act in the face of co-ordinated disinformation campaigns. Meta has experience of this from 2016, but there is a lot stake. Not only does it still have billions of active users on Facebook and Instagram, but now you can throw Threads into the mix.

That was an unlikely win for the company this year. As the platform formerly known as Twitter made some unpopular choices, it left room for a competitor. Into the void stepped Threads, linked to Instagram so people had a ready-made community to follow.

The launch was considered a success, with the service registering 100 million users in its first few days even without officially launching in the EU. There is no official date yet for when EU users will get the service, but O’Leary is hopeful that it will soon be available here.

That will come after engagement with the Data Protection Commission in Ireland, something to which, as head of a telecoms company, O’Leary is no stranger. Meta’s most recent high-profile entanglement with the DPC resulted in a record €1.2 billion fine, driven by its European counterparts. Despite that, Meta has a “constructive relationship” with the Data Protection Commission.

“They have a very complex and tough job to do,” she says. “Privacy, data security is at the heart of how we build our products and how we engage with regulators. We will continue that constructive engagement. As technology is evolving so fast, and the landscape is changing so fast, we need to continue to work together, in a constructive way. And it’s not just Meta; it’s right across the tech industry, with regulators, so we keep people safe online.”

That will include testing the decisions in the courts; Meta has appealed against a number of the enforcement actions taken by the DPC, some of which are still working their way through the system.

In the meantime, O’Leary is pushing ahead with her ambition to make Dublin an energetic hub for Meta’s business globally.

“I think it’s like the best and the most exciting time to be here. Looking into the future, I see a clear strategy and a clear vision and the mission of bringing the world closer together and building the future and a better future,” she says.

“It’s been very rewarding. I think it’ll continue, and I’m going to continue to learn and be a curious person. We’re all learning, and to be in an industry, actually, that’s constantly changing, constantly evolving and where you’re constantly learning is a privilege because we never get bored. I hope in five years time, we’d be talking about what we’ve done.”