Facebook to assemble global team of 'diplomats'

With 70 percent of its more than 600 million members outside the United States, Facebook is creating its own foreign service, hiring a network of ambassadors from India to Ireland to represent the social network with foreign governments and cultures.

Facebook's new global policy team will monitor the local political landscape and act as multilingual, TV-friendly communicators in countries and for cultures that, in many cases, have very different values and laws about privacy and personal communications than the US. Facebook is confronting its emergence as a global organization whose membership is much larger than the population of most countries, and whose technology can antagonize both Middle Eastern dictators and European democracies fretful about privacy. The international directors of policy, as Facebook calls them, will grapple with those challenges. "This is the right investment for us to make because we want to have better relationships with regulators and policymakers across Europe and around the world," said Debbie Frost, a Facebook spokeswoman. "It's important that we have a presence, so people can have a direct line into Facebook. You limit the scope for misunderstandings."