Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) Q3 2020 Earnings Conference Call - Final Transcript

Good afternoon. My name is Mike and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Facebook's Third Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] This call will be recorded. Thank you very much.

Ms. Deborah Crawford, Facebook's Vice President of Investor Relations, you may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Facebook's third quarter 2020 earnings conference call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Mark Zuckerberg, CEO; Sheryl Sandberg, COO and Dave Wehner, CFO.

Before we get started, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause these results to differ materially are set forth in today's press release and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we may present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. The press release and an accompanying investor presentation are available on our website at investor.fb.com.

And now I'd like to turn the call over to Mark.

All right. Thanks everyone for joining us today. I hope you're all staying safe and doing well. We had another strong quarter as people and businesses continue to rely on our services to stay connected and create economic opportunity, especially during these tough times. Now 2.5 billion people around the world use one or more of our apps, each day. More than 200 million businesses use our free tools and there are more than 10 million active advertisers across our services. Most of these are small businesses which otherwise would have had a much harder time moving online and reaching customers during this pandemic and that's something that I'm really proud of.

And before I cover other topics, the election is of course top of mind for everyone right now, so I want to start there. I've discussed our effort many times on previous calls, but I want to take a few minutes to reiterate how far we have come since 2016. Four years ago, our security teams were looking for traditional threats like hacking, but what we ended up seeing was something new; coordinated interference campaigns using fake accounts. They tried to spread misinformation and discord and since then, we've built the most advanced systems in the world to find and remove these threats and it shows in the numbers. In the years since, we've taken down more than 100 networks including from Russia, Iran, and China, and we blocked millions of potentially