# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The surge in Facebook usage during early shelter-in-place orders in the United States was not just a blip. Daily users of Facebook increased 12 percent year over year, to 1.79 billion. Monthly usage across its family of apps, which also include Instagram and WhatsApp, rose 14 percent, to 3.14 billion. And Facebook's mostly ad-based based business rose along with them: the company's revenue was up 11 percent year over year, to $18.69 billion.

"We're glad to be able to provide small businesses the tools they need to grow and be successful online during these challenging times," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. "And we're proud that people can rely on our services to stay connected when they can't always be together in person."

The company's stock surged more than 5 percent in after-hours trading.

While Facebook has thrived during the pandemic, its growth is still lower than that of other tech giants. For example, Amazon revenue grew 40 percent to $89 billion in earnings announced Thursday, beating analyst expectations by roughly $8 billion. Still, Facebook did better than Alphabet, where revenue declined 2 percent year over year.

But the company's numbers are impressive in part because of a high-profile advertiser boycott that roiled the social network in July. Coca-Cola, Lego, Starbucks, and Unilever are among the companies that pulled advertising from Facebook and other social networks, driven by a coalition of civil rights groups that accused them of doing too little to stop the spread of hate speech.

Even without big-brand advertisers, Facebook was able to grow revenue on the strength of the millions of small businesses that rely on it for direct-response advertising. Facebook said in the first three weeks of July, revenue growth was roughly in line with its second quarter growth rate of 10 percent, indicating that the company had largely shrugged off the boycott.

As it did last quarter, the company warned that increased engagement may not last once the COVID-19 pandemic begins to subside. "More recently, we are seeing signs of normalization in user growth and engagement as shelter‑in-place measures have eased around the world, particularly in developed markets where Facebook's penetration is higher," the company said.

Usage will be flat or slightly down next quarter, the company said.

Facebook has $58.24 billion in cash and cash equivalents on hand, the company said. It now has 52,534 employees, up 32 percent from a year earlier.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Facebook usage and revenue continue to grow as the pandemic rages on

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The surge in Facebook usage during early shelter-in-place orders in the United States was not just a blip. Daily users of Facebook increased 12 percent year over year, to 1.79 billion. Monthly usage across its family of apps, which also include Instagram and WhatsApp, rose 14 percent, to 3.14 billion.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Last week, Senator Dick Durbin asked: "Mr Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?"

The Facebook CEO froze and then answered: "No."

"If you've messaged anyone this week, would you share with us the names of the people you've messaged?"

Zuckerberg responded in the negative. The questioning drives home the alarming truth about Facebook and other tech giant's surveillance of billions globally.

Facebook tracks us, and not just the things we've shared with our friends. If we use Facebook's Messenger service, we may have allowed it to access all our contacts, including the names and phone numbers of our doctors, children, favorite pizza delivery services, clients, and more. It tracks all of the dates, times, devices, IP addresses, and browser information from every time we've visited Facebook; a history of the conversations we've had on Facebook Chat and messages in our private inboxes; and of course, every ad we've clicked or article we've viewed.

Then there's Google, which tracks users more extensively than Facebook does. We've unwittingly allowed Google to keep information on all our locations, every search we've done, every news article we've read, and every app we've used.

We have submitted to this surveillance while the tech giants have profited. The broad conversation on Facebook underscores its monopoly power: people feel disgusted with the company, but they lack alternatives. That is the essence of monopolies. They squelch innovation by startups and buy out any viable competitors.

The lack of government use of antitrust laws in this context emphasizes the blind spots. Perhaps because it didn't appear in the clothing of Orwell's "Big Brother", we did not see it coming.

America's founders were deeply concerned by tyranny. They used the constitution to divide powers among the federal branches of government, the federal and the state governments, and the constituencies of elected representatives. The idea was to prevent any one entity from amassing so much power that it could oppress individual liberty.

'We've allowed Google to keep information on all our locations, every search we've done, every news article we've read.' Photograph: Benoit Tessier/Reuters

The founders did not, however, envision the tyranny of the corporation. The influence corporations have in politics, from campaign funding to lobbying, has hobbled our ability to govern ourselves in many areas. The ascendancy of the tech monopolies and the impotence of the government are evidence of corporatocracy.

Facebook and the other tech monopolies dwarf the power of the state, transcend national boundaries, and require new thinking and structures to thwart their tyrannical impact on people's lives. Why did senators ask Zuckerberg if he was open to regulation? Why did they structure hearings that prevented critical interrogations? When Congress is in a "Mother may I?" mode with a monopoly that has enabled foreign propaganda to influence the US presidential election and exposed the data of at least 87 million Facebook users, something is seriously wrong.

The nefarious uses of our personal data abound. If Cambridge Analytica can get it, what's stopping a government from getting it, too? The greatest tyranny yet would be the merging of corporate monopoly and governmental power to create the most invasive surveillance state in history.

Many ideas for regulatory reforms to protect privacy fail to address the governance problems we face. Our government was not built to counter the tyranny of the global corporation.

With the fervor of the early US founders, we need to debate and adopt a new structure for self-government that is strong enough to counter the global monopolies of the 21st century. Our liberty is at stake.

Melissa K Scanlan is a professor of law at Vermont Law School, teaches legislation and regulation, is the director of the New Economy Law Center, and writes from the Brave Little State.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Facebook is a tyranny - and our government isn't built to stop it

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Last week, Senator Dick Durbin asked: "Mr Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?" The Facebook CEO froze and then answered: "No." "If you've messaged anyone this week, would you share with us the names of the people you've messaged?"

# data[].attributes.headline
Facebook and Orlik’s Moral Duties      Devin Moran School of Communication and Media, Montclair State UniversityCMST 325:Media Criticism Dr. GreenwoodMay 21, 2021

# data[].attributes.subject
Facebook and Orlik’s Moral Duties      Devin Moran School of Communication and Media, Montclair State UniversityCMST 325:Media Criticism Dr. GreenwoodMay 21, 2021

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In late 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced an ambitious plan: to create an independent oversight board.

The board can overrule Facebook's content moderation guidelines, and can even overrule Zuckerberg.

Last week, the group made its first rulings on disputed content. It overturned 4 out of the 5 cases it saw.

The board consists of 20 people, including a former prime minister, a Nobel laureate, and human rights experts.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

With more than 2 billion users, Facebook has a major content moderation problem on its hands.

Whether you're talking about the platform's use by Russian government-backed trolls in the 2016 US Presidential election, or to spread propaganda during the 2016 Rohingya genocide, or when a shooter livestreamed a mass shooting in New Zealand, Facebook has faced moderation issue after moderation issue across the past few years.

And the company is well aware of the enormity of its problem. "One of the most painful lessons I've learned," CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in late 2018, "is that when you connect two billion people, you will see all the beauty and ugliness of humanity."
Read more: How Silicon Valley banished Donald Trump in 48 hours
As a result, Facebook established an oversight board that it says is outside of Facebook's control, that can ultimately overrule Facebook's own policies on content management. The company has even pledged $130 million to get the board funded and operational. It launched in 2020, and made it first rulings this past week.

The board will eventually swell to nearly double its current size, Facebook says, but these are the inaugural 20 members:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Facebook's 'Supreme Court' that has the power to overrule Mark Zuckerberg just handed down its first decisions - these are the Oversight Board's first 20 members

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In late 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced an ambitious plan: to create an independent oversight board. The board can overrule Facebook's content moderation guidelines, and can even overrule Zuckerberg. Last week, the group made its first rulings on disputed content. It overturned 4 out of the 5 cases it saw.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers' biggest fear as a parent isn't gun violence, or drunk driving, or anything related to the pandemic.

It's social media.

And specifically, the new sense of "brokenness" she hears about in children in her district, and nationwide. Teen depression and suicide rates have been rising for over a decade, and she sees social apps as a major reason.

At a hearing this March on Capitol Hill, the Republican congresswoman from Washington confronted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Google CEO Sundar Pichai with a list of statistics:From 2011 to 2018, rates of teen depression increased by more than 60%, and from 2009 to 2015, emergency room admissions for self-harm among 10- to 14-year-old girls tripled.

"It's a battle for their development. It's a battle for their mental health - and ultimately a battle for their safety," McMorris Rodgers told the tech leaders.

But when she pointed a question specifically to Zuckerberg, about whether he acknowledged a connection between children's declining mental health and social media platforms, he demurred.

"I don't think that the research is conclusive on that," replied Zuckerberg.

It's a position that he and his company, which is working on expanding its offerings to even younger children, have held for years. But mental health researchers whom NPR spoke with disagree.

They describe an increasingly clear correlation between poor mental health outcomes and social media use, and they worry that Facebook (which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp) in particular may be muddying the waters on that connection to protect its public image.

"The correlational evidence showing that there is a link between social media use and depression is pretty definitive at this point," said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University. "The largest and most well-conducted studies that we have all show that teens who spend more time on social media are more likely to be depressed or unhappy."

Correlation is not causation, and one area of further study is whether greater social media usage leads to poor mental health outcomes or whether those who are depressed and unhappy are drawn to spend more time on social media. But researchers also worry that not enough government funding is going toward getting objective data to answer these sorts of questions.

Facebook also almost certainly knows more than it has publicly revealed about how its products affect people.

NPR spoke with Twenge and two other academics whose work has focused on the links between depression and social media use and who say Facebook's public affairs team reached out to them for the first time ever in recent months for input on internal information related to the issue.

The company declined to comment about the meeting requests and about its stance on research about its platforms. But the outreach comes at a pivotal time for Facebook and its plans for growth.

Government regulation is closer than ever before, and the issue of children's mental health is one of the few concerns about Big Tech that Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on.

After it was revealed that Facebook was working on a version of Instagram for children under 13, a bipartisan group of 44 attorneys general wrote a letter to Zuckerberg this month with a simple message: Stop.

"Use of social media can be detrimental to the health and well-being of children, who are not equipped to navigate the challenges of having a social media account," the letter reads. "Further, Facebook has historically failed to protect the welfare of children on its platforms."

Shortly after McMorris Rodgers spoke at the March congressional hearing, Rep. Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat, asked Zuckerberg whether he was familiar with a 2019 study that found the risk of depression in children rises with each hour spent daily on social media. He said he was not.

"You enjoy an outdated liability shield that incentivizes you to look the other way or take half-measures," Castor said, "while you make billions at the expense of our kids, our health and the truth."
Internal "insights"
Twenge has been studying and writing about technology's effects on people born between 1995 and 2012 for much of the last decade.

She dubbed the generation "iGen" in a 2017 book that features an abundance of charts showing huge drop-offs in happiness among teens in the last decade compared with previous generations and huge increases in loneliness and suicide risk, especially in teens who are on their phones more than an hour or two a day.

And since 2017, those trends have mostly gotten worse.

"For depression and anxiety and self-harm, those increases have continued," Twenge said. "As smartphones became even more pervasive, social media became even more pervasive."

In the four years since her book came out, no one from any of the major social media companies reached out to her.

Until about three months ago.

"I got an email from someone at Facebook who said they were putting together an advisory panel," Twenge said.

The email came from a lower-level employee at the company on behalf of Heather Moore, a public affairs executive at Facebook who helped create the company's Oversight Board. (That panel, which is funded by Facebook through a $130 million independent trust, is made up of 20 prominent experts from around the world.) The board recently announced its biggest decision yet, siding with the company on its decision to suspend former President Donald Trump from the platform.

Two other researchers NPR spoke with say they received a similar meeting request. One did not wish to be named in this story.

The request says Facebook is "currently working on speaking with a range of experts who study algorithms and virality," but it doesn't specify whether the company is planning to assemble a more organized public- or private-facing group of experts focused on the mental health effects of the platform.

Facebook declined to provide more detail about the requests, but a spokesperson did note that a company as large as Facebook reaches out to a variety of subject-matter experts frequently.

The email does, however, allude to the company having relevant internal information.

"The team would like to share some insights about what we're working on internally and ask for your input," the email says.

In the March hearing on Capitol Hill, Zuckerberg told McMorris Rodgers that the company has specifically researched the mental health effects that his company's platforms have on children. But when McMorris Rodgers' staff followed up after the hearing, she says the company declined to share any of its research.

"I believe that they have done the research. They're not being transparent," McMorris Rodgers told NPR in an interview. "They seem to be more concerned about their current business model, and they have become very wealthy under their current business model. But the fact of the matter is we're seeing more and more evidence ... that their current business model is harming our kids."

Generally in response to these kinds of questions, Facebook has pointed to research indicating that poor mental health outcomes like depressionstem from how people use the platforms and specifically whether they are "active" users who post and message people or "passive" users who mostly consume content.

The implication is that people have control over whether they feel bad from using the platforms, since users have a choice in whether they message their friends on Instagram, for instance, or whether they choose to scroll endlessly.

But Melissa Hunt, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says it's not so simple.

The company's success is dependent on keeping people engaged and selling advertisements based on that engagement, so Facebook, she says, is motivated to create systems that keep people on its platforms no matter the effect to their long-term well-being.

Hunt was another one of the researchers who received an inquiry from Facebook about her work linking social media use and depression.

"Basically all of the things that would contribute to these platforms being healthier for people to use, which is basically spend less time, don't follow strangers, don't spend time passively scrolling through this random feed that's being suggested to you," Hunt says. "That completely undermines their whole business model."

When she got a request for her time from the company, she says she thought about it. Then she also thought about what Facebook is currently valued at: close to a trillion dollars.

"I decided that if they were serious about that, they could pay me a nominal consulting fee," Hunt says. "So I let them know what my consulting fee was. I said I'd be delighted to weigh in and share my expertise with you."

She never heard back.

Similarly, Twenge responded to the request from the company and said she was interested in setting up a time to talk, but after a few back-and-forth messages, she has yet to hear back again.

Twenge feels strongly that while the research on the psychological impact of social media is relatively new, there are takeaways that can already be drawn, even as some insist on labeling it all "inconclusive."

"It's similar to the way that climate deniers can point to a few people in that field and say, 'There's a few people who still doubt this.' It's that false equivalence that happens too often," Twenge said. "In this case, that small but vocal group has been very skilled at getting that message out, perhaps because these companies are very receptive to it."
Questions without answers
In recent years, some have taken to comparing social media to something else that previous generations used to fill idle moments to the detriment of their health: smoking cigarettes.

After smoking became nearly universal, cigarette companies famously muddied the waters on research about how their products were harming people.

"Policy making is facilitated by consensus. However, scientific research is characterized by uncertainty," wrote researcher Lisa Bero in a paper about how cigarette companies manipulated research. "It is often to the benefit of interest groups to generate controversy about data because the controversy is likely to slow or prevent regulation of a given product."

But Brian Primack, who leads the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas, says comparing the current research situation around social media and cigarettes is too simplistic.

Primack used to study tobacco. ("If it kills a lot of people, I want to study it," he says about how he has chosen what to focus on throughout his career.)

Now, he spends his time investigating the effects of social media. And he sees a clear connection between depression and the online platforms.

A study he published last year found that young adults who increased their social media usage over a period of time were also found to be significantly more likely to become depressed over that same time period.

"There is an association between the two," Primack says. "Just meaning that if you put people into equal buckets in terms of how much social media they use, the people who use the most social media are also the people who are the most depressed."

But unlike cigarettes, which he says have no usefulpurpose, some people have shown positive health outcomes from using social media.

Brain development research in recent years, for instance, found benefits in 9- and 10-year-olds from using social media.

"Social media is very heterogeneous. In some kids it can be very beneficial, and in other kids it can be very detrimental," said the author of that study, Dr. Martin Paulus of the Laureate Institute for Brain Research. "But we still don't understand which group of kids benefit from it and which group of kids may be harmed by it."

Paulus is not confident the social media companies truly want to get to the bottom of that question either.

Several years ago, Paulus gave a presentation at Facebook with a few other researchers who were looking at the effects of social media. He came away from the meeting feeling like the company wasn't serious about actually having objective research.

"It was more like a face-saving activity," Paulus said. "Those companies, whether it's Facebook or other companies as well, they say they want research... But they're not necessarily interested in research that potentially would show that some of the things that they do are bad for kids."

It's a thorny issue to wade into. The company says that it employs hundreds of researchers and that it also supports efforts like Boston Children's Hospital's newly formed Digital Wellness Lab and the Aspen Institute's roundtables on loneliness and technology.

But it has also been criticized for using its platforms for research purposes. In 2012, the company allowed researchers to change what people saw on the platform in order to see how that would affect the nature of what they then chose to post.

The study did show evidence that people's moods are affected by what they see other people posting, but some saw the exercise as emotional manipulation, and one of the authors seemed to express regret about conducting it after the backlash.

For a company with one of the largest data troves on the human population, this question of how best to conduct research expands to other sectors too. Disinformation researchers, for instance, have long been frustrated by what the company chooses and chooses not to share.

"They could answer questions that we desperately need answered any time they want, and they just won't do it," said Ben Scott, executive director at Reset, an initiative aimed at tackling digital threats to democracy. "They've chosen, for public relations reasons, not to participate in helping the public interest... And that's outrageous."
"God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains"
The potential dangers of kids spending hours hypnotized by their screens has been apparent essentially since the social media platforms were created.

Founding Facebook President Sean Parker once described, in an interview with Axios, the company's algorithms as "exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology."

"God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains," Parker said. "The inventors, creators - it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people - understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."

The problem is compounded by how little government funding is going toward studying the effects of these platforms, relative to how much of each day many Americans spend engaged with the technology.

Funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is mostly focused on curing diseases, but because there is no specific disease officially associated with screen time, experts say it's difficult to get studies funded by the federal government.

In 2019, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., introduced a bill that would have provided a mechanism for more NIH research on the subject. The legislation had bipartisan co-sponsors and the support of Facebook, but it never made it to a vote.

Without more of that sort of research, parents are essentially left in the dark guessing exactly how much is too much for their kids when it comes to their devices.

"The truth of it, quite frankly, is we are probably living through one of the biggest natural experiments that we've gone through with our kids," said Paulus.
Editor's note: Facebook is among NPR's financial supporters.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Facebook Calls Links To Depression Inconclusive. These Researchers Disagree

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers' biggest fear as a parent isn't gun violence, or drunk driving, or anything related to the pandemic. It's social media. And specifically, the new sense of "brokenness" she hears about in children in her district, and nationwide.

# data[].attributes.body
Facebook's influence on society has been rapidly growing over the past decade. This growth in power and distribution has caused many to question the moral priority and responsibility of Facebook.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Facebook's quasi-independent Oversight Board on May 5, 2021, upheld the company's suspension of former President Donald Trump from the platform and Instagram. The decision came four months after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg banned Trump "indefinitely" for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. The board chastised Facebook for failing to either set an end date for the suspension or permanently ban Trump and gave the social media company six months to resolve the matter.

What is this Oversight Board that made one of the most politically perilous decisions Facebook has ever faced? Why did the company create it, and is it a good idea? We asked Siri Terjesen, an expert on corporate governance, to answer these and several other questions.

1. What is the Facebook Oversight Board?

The Oversight Board was set up to give users an independent third party to whom they can appeal Facebook moderation decisions, as well as to help set the policies that govern these decisions. The idea was first proposed by Zuckerberg in 2018 after a discussion with Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman, and the board began work in October 2020, funded by a US$130 million trust provided by Facebook to cover the initial six years of operating expenses.

According to the board, it "was created to help Facebook answer some of the most difficult questions around freedom of expression online: what to take down, what to leave up, and why." The Oversight Board has final decision-making authority, even above the board of directors, and its decisions are binding on Facebook.

The Oversight Board has 20 members from around the world and a diverse variety of disciplines and backgrounds, such as journalism, human rights and law, as well as different political perspectives. It even includes a former prime minister. The goal is to eventually expand the board to 40 members in total.

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

2. What other decisions has it made?

So far, the board has reviewed 10 Facebook decisions, including the one involving Trump. The decisions involved a variety of types of content, such as posts that were removed because they were deemed racist, indecent or intended to incite violence. It overturned Facebook's ruling in six of the cases and upheld it in three of them. In the 10th case, the user deleted the post that Facebook had removed, which ended the board's review.

In cases where the board overruled Facebook, the posts that had been removed were reinstated. And the board sometimes urged the company to clarify or revise its guidelines.

Given that Facebook is expected to take 20 to 30 billion enforcement actions in 2021 alone, it's unlikely the Oversight Board will be able to handle more than a handful of the most high-profile cases, like that of Trump. It's one of the reasons the Oversight Board is dubbed " Facebook's Supreme Court."

3. Is it a model other social media companies are likely to follow?

As a platform company, Facebook is unique.

It's a social media giant that must monitor a global operation that generates over $86 billion in revenue, employs 58,600 people and serves more than 2.8 billion active monthly users - more than a third of the world's population - as well as millions of advertisers. Very few companies operate in a space that involves user content moderation, and none at this scale. Other platform companies have considerably less content, and usually only in one language, whereas Facebook is available in 100 languages.

Given Facebook's shareholder-elected corporate board of directors includes just 10 people, each of whom has their own demanding day job, it is not surprising to me that Zuckerberg decided to set up an outside panel to develop decisions about speech and online safety.

It's unlikely, however, that other companies will ever have a similar type of board. The Oversight Board has been extremely resource intensive. It took over two years to establish through a series of 22 roundtable meetings with participants in 88 countries, six in-depth workshops, 250 one-on-one discussions and 1,200 submissions - not to mention its high cost of $130 million, which is meant to last six years.

4. Was it a good idea, from a corporate governance standpoint?

A growing body of research questions whether directors on corporate boards can fulfill their oversight responsibilities on their own, due to the sheer amount of information that must be obtained, processed and shared.

While I think we will see more corporate boards outsource some decisions and processes to external panels - as a small board cannot be expected to have the requisite knowledge and skills on all topics - few corporations are likely to follow Facebook's lead and grant an outside body the power to make unilateral decisions.

Since only the board of directors is beholden to a company's shareholders, board directors ultimately need to take the final responsibility for corporate decisions.

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

5. Does the Oversight Board shield Facebook from political or legal fallout?

While it's likely that some at Facebook hoped shifting its thorniest decisions would insulate the company, executives and corporate board members from political or legal problems, as the Trump decision shows, it won't actually do that.

Certainly the decision to utilize an outside oversight body might be interpreted as political, as all 10 Facebook board directors live and work predominantly in the United States and might be hesitant to vote to make decisions like restricting the freedom of expression of a former president who still commands support among many Americans - and won 47% of the popular vote in the last election.

But whether Facebook makes the decision itself or outsources to an independent board, Facebook will still face the consequences if the decision to uphold the Trump ban alienates Americans or people around the world who feel it is an attack on their freedom of expression.

People may leave Facebook for other platforms such as Parler, Gab and Signal, as many have already done since the initial Trump ban in January - and knowing an outside body made the decision won't stop them.

And a poor "political" decision could drive away some advertisers and make it harder to hire and retain employees, regardless of who made it.

6. How are other social media companies handling these issues differently?

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made an internal decision to permanently suspended Trump from his company's platform on Jan. 8, 2021. While Dorsey acknowledged that the decision set a "dangerous precedent," Twitter, like other social media companies, doesn't have an appeals process for that kind of decision.

Some newer companies, such as MeWe and Rumble, offer more lax content moderation in order to allow greater freedom of expression for users.

Gab describes itself as "A social network that champions free speech, individual liberty and the free flow of information online. All are welcome." Parler's content guidelines are even more basic and keeps content moderation to an "absolute minimum. We prefer to leave decisions about what is seen and who is heard to each individual."

Gab and Parler are presently banned from the app stores of both Apple and Google due to a lack of content moderation.

[ You're smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation's authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Facebook created its own 'supreme court' for judging content - 6 questions answered

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Facebook's quasi-independent Oversight Board on May 5, 2021, upheld the company's suspension of former President Donald Trump from the platform and Instagram. The decision came four months after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg banned Trump "indefinitely" for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
US regulators and 48 attorneys general are limbering up for what promises to be the biggest legal battle against a US company in decades. Letitia James, the New York attorney general who is spearheading one of two lawsuits against Facebook, this week accused the social network of abusing its "dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals, snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users."

In a powerful speech, James said Facebook used its "vast troves of data and money" to fund a "buy or bury" scheme to quash competition. James said she would not rest until the courts ordered Facebook to sell off WhatsApp and Instagram, which she said the social network had acquired illegally.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has also filed a lawsuit against Facebook accusing it of operating a "systematic strategy to eliminate threats to its monopoly", and accused its co-founder, CEO and controlling shareholder, Mark Zuckerberg, of paying $1bn (£750,000,000) to buy Instagram in 2012 in order to "neutralise a competitor".

If the lawsuit achieves the FTC's goal of forcing Facebook to sell WhatsApp and Instagram, it will be the first time an antitrust lawsuit has succeeded in forcing the split of major corporation since 1984, when the telecoms network AT&T - then known colloquially as Ma Bell - was ordered to sell off a string of local telecommunications companies known as the Baby Bells.

Zuckerberg has assured staff he will fight to keep his empire intact. "We disagree with the government's allegations and we plan to fight this in court," he said. "We compete with many other services in everything we do, and we compete fairly."

In a Facebook post, he said the lawsuits would not have "any impact on individual teams or roles" and he expected the case would take "years to play out in its entirety". Comments were turned off on the post, and staff were advised not to talk about the lawsuits "except with our legal team".

Antitrust lawyers and competition experts agree with Zuckerberg that the case will take years, and when it does finally conclude few expect James and the 47 other attorneys generals to emerge victorious with WhatsApp and Instagram in independent hands again.

George Hay, a former member of the US Department of Justice's antitrust division and now a professor of law at Cornell University, said: "I don't think anything is going to happen in the short run. Facebook has no incentive to resolve this case. It is not like they are facing jail sentences or a big fine."

Seth Bloom, formerly general counsel to the US Senate antitrust subcommittee and now the founder of Bloom Strategic Counsel, said he thought it would be difficult for the courts to force the sale of WhatsApp and Instagram, because the FTC had investigated competition concerns at the time of the purchases and approved the deals it was now asking to have reversed. "We're talking about acquisitions that are six or eight years old and it will be difficult for a court to order divestitures of many years ago," he said.

But Jonathan Compton, a specialist in regulatory, antitrust and competition law at the London law firm DMH Stallard, said the lawsuits represented the biggest threat ever posed to big technology companies.

"The thrust of the current suit against Facebook is that it bought Instagram and WhatsApp with the intent of reducing competition against it," Compton said. "It is unlawful to take over a company with a view to stifling competition, and Zuckerberg has allegedly written an unfortunate email in which he said he intends to build an anti-competitive moat around Facebook to protect it from competition. I suspect a lot is going to be made of that email."

In one of the emails in the FTC filing, Zuckerberg is alleged to have said in 2008 that "it is better to buy than compete". In another email, in 2012, Zuckerberg is said to have told lieutenants that WhatsApp was "legitimately a better product for mobile messaging than even our standalone Messenger app" and "[u]nfortunately for us, I don't think there's any way to directly minimise the advantage which is their momentum and growth rate".

After buying WhatsApp in 2014 for $19bn, Facebook employees were alleged to have celebrated the purchase of "probably the only company which could have grown into the next FB purely on mobile".

The lawsuits claim these emails show that Facebook was operating a "systematic strategy to eliminate threats to its monopoly". This would be a breach of the Sherman Act, one of the US's oldest antitrust laws.

It was the Sherman Act of 1890 that was used in 1984 to break up AT&T, and in 1911 to force the breakup of John D Rockefeller's Standard Oil and American Tobacco. However, Compton said the law was broad and difficult to interpret. Twenty years ago the US courts also ordered the breakup of Microsoft over allegations it had stifled Netscape, but the decision was reversed on appeal.

Margrethe Vestager, the European competition commissioner, who has regularly attempted to rein in big tech companies, has welcomed the US action. "It's a sign that the debate on tech dominance has been shifting over the last couple of years," Vestager said in a meeting with EU lawmakers. "You see that in almost every jurisdiction."

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority this week proposed that the UK's planned new technology regulator should have the power to fine Facebook, Google and other large tech firms billions of pounds if they fail to stick to a new code of conduct.

Facebook, which has 2.7 billion users and a market value of nearly $800bn, strenuously denies the charges, which it describes as "revisionist history" that punishes success. "The government now wants a do-over, sending a chilling warning to American business that no sale is ever final," Jennifer Newstead, Facebook's head lawyer [general counsel], said a blogpost.

"The Instagram you see today is the Instagram that Facebook built, not the app it acquired," she said. "When Facebook bought Instagram, it had about 2% of the users it has today, just 13 employees, no revenue and virtually no infrastructure of its own."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Facebook faces biggest legal battle in years as US officials launch lawsuits

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
US regulators and 48 attorneys general are limbering up for what promises to be the biggest legal battle against a US company in decades. Letitia James, the New York attorney general who is spearheading one of two lawsuits against Facebook, this week accused the social network of abusing its "dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals, snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A decade of apparent indifference for data privacy at Facebook has culminated in revelations that organizations harvested user data for targeted advertising, particularly political advertising, to apparent success. While the most well-known offender is Cambridge Analytica-the political consulting and strategic communication firm behind the pro-Brexit Leave EU campaign, as well as Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign-other companies have likely used similar tactics to collect personal data of Facebook users.

TechRepublic's cheat sheet about the Facebook data privacy scandal covers the ongoing controversy surrounding the illicit use of profile information. This article will be updated as more information about this developing story comes to the forefront. It is also available as a download, Cheat sheet: Facebook Data Privacy Scandal (free PDF).
SEE: Navigating data privacy (ZDNet/TechRepublic special feature) | SEE: Information security policy (TechRepublic Premium)Download the free PDF version (TechRepublic)
What is the Facebook data privacy scandal?

The Facebook data privacy scandal centers around the collection of personally identifiable information of " up to 87 million people " by the political consulting and strategic communication firm Cambridge Analytica. That company-and others-were able to gain access to personal data of Facebook users due to the confluence of a variety of factors, broadly including inadequate safeguards against companies engaging in data harvesting, little to no oversight of developers by Facebook, developer abuse of the Facebook API, and users agreeing to overly broad terms and conditions.
SEE: Can Russian hackers be stopped? Here's why it might take 20 years (TechRepublic cover story) | download the PDF version Additional resources
In the case of Cambridge Analytica, the company was able to harvest personally identifiable information through a personality quiz app called thisisyourdigitiallife, based on the OCEAN personality model. Information gathered via this app is useful in building a "psychographic" profile of users (the OCEAN acronym stands for openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). Adding the app to your Facebook account to take the quiz gives the creator of the app access to profile information and user history for the user taking the quiz, as well as all of the friends that user has on Facebook. This data includes all of the items that users and their friends have liked on Facebook.
Must-read security coverage
Researchers associated with Cambridge University claimed in a paper that it "can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender," with a model developed by the researchers that uses a combination of dimensionality reduction and logistic/linear regression to infer this information about users.
SEE: All TechRepublic cheat sheets and smart person's guides
The model-according to the researchers-is effective due to the relationship of likes to a given attribute. However, most likes are not explicitly indicative of their attributes. The researchers note that "less than 5% of users labeled as gay were connected with explicitly gay groups," but that liking "Juicy Couture" and "Adam Lambert" are likes indicative of gay men, while "WWE" and "Being Confused After Waking Up From Naps" are likes indicative of straight men. Other such connections are peculiarly lateral, with "curly fries" being an indicator of high IQ, "sour candy" being an indicator of not smoking, and "Gene Wilder" being an indicator that the user's parents had not separated by age 21.
SEE: The Brexit dilemma: Will London's start-ups stay or go? (TechRepublic cover story)
What is the timeline of the Facebook data privacy scandal?

Facebook has more than a decade-long track record of incidents highlighting inadequate and insufficient measures to protect data privacy. While the severity of these individual cases varies, the sequence of repeated failures paints a larger picture of systemic problems.

In 2005, researchers at MIT created a script that downloaded publicly posted information of more than 70,000 users from four schools. (Facebook only began to allow search engines to crawl profiles in September 2007.)

In 2011, following an FTC investigation, the company entered into a consent decree, promising to address concerns about how user data was tracked and shared. That investigation was prompted by an incident in December 2009 in which information thought private by users was being shared publicly, according to contemporaneous reporting by The New York Times.

In 2013, Facebook disclosed details of a bug that exposed the personal details of six million accounts over approximately a year. When users downloaded their own Facebook history, that user would obtain in the same action not just their own address book, but also the email addresses and phone numbers of their friends that other people had stored in their address books. The data that Facebook exposed had not been given to Facebook by users to begin with-it had been vacuumed from the contact lists of other Facebook users who happen to know that person. This phenomenon has since been described as "shadow profiles."

The Cambridge Analytica portion of the data privacy scandal starts in February 2014. A spate of reviews on the Turkopticon website-a third-party review website for users of Amazon's Mechanical Turk-detail a task requested by Aleksandr Kogan asking users to complete a survey in exchange for money. The survey required users to add the thisisyourdigitiallife app to their Facebook account, which is in violation of Mechanical Turk's terms of service. One review quotes the request as requiring users to "provide our app access to your Facebook so we can download some of your data-some demographic data, your likes, your friends list, whether your friends know one another, and some of your private messages."

In December 2015, Facebook learned for the first time that the data set Kogan generated with the app was shared with Cambridge Analytica. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims "we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications."

According to Cambridge Analytica, the company took legal action in August 2016 against GSR (Kogan) for licensing "illegally acquired data" to the company, with a settlement reached that November.

On March 17, 2018, an exposé was published by The Guardian and The New York Times, initially reporting that 50 million Facebook profiles were harvested by Cambridge Analytica; the figure was later revised to "up to 87 million" profiles. The exposé relies on information provided by Christopher Wylie, a former employee of SCL Elections and Global Science Research, the creator of the thisisyourdigitiallife app. Wylie claimed that the data from that app was sold to Cambridge Analytica, which used the data to develop "psychographic" profiles of users, and target users with pro-Trump advertising, a claim that Cambridge Analytica denied.

On March 20, 2018, the FTC opened an investigation to determine if Facebook had violated the terms of the settlement from the 2011 investigation.

In April 2018, reports indicated that Facebook granted Zuckerberg and other high ranking executives powers over controlling personal information on a platform that is not available to normal users. Messages from Zuckerberg sent to other users were remotely deleted from users' inboxes, which the company claimed was part of a corporate security measure following the 2014 Sony Pictures hack. Facebook subsequently announced plans to make available the "unsend" capability "to all users in several months," and that Zuckerberg will be unable to unsend messages until such time that feature rolls out. Facebook added the feature 10 months later, on February 6, 2019. The public feature permits users to delete messages up to 10 minutes after the messages were sent. In the controversy prompting this feature to be added, Zuckerberg deleted messages months after they were sent.

On April 4, 2018, The Washington Post reported that Facebook announced "malicious actors" abused the search function to gather public profile information of "most of its 2 billion users worldwide."

In a CBS News/YouGov poll published on April 10, 2018, 61% of Americans said Congress should do more to regulate social media and tech companies. This sentiment was echoed in a CBS News interview with Box CEO Aaron Levie and YML CEO Ashish Toshniwal who called on Congress to regulate Facebook. According to Levie, "There are so many examples where we don't have modern ways of either regulating, controlling, or putting the right protections in place in the internet age. And this is a fundamental issue that, that we're gonna have to grapple with as an industry for the next decade."

On April 18, 2018, Facebook updated its privacy policy.

On May 2, 2018, SCL Group, which owns Cambridge Analytica, was dissolved. In a press release, the company indicated that "the siege of media coverage has driven away virtually all of the Company's customers and suppliers."

On May 15, 2018, The New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica is being investigated by the FBI and the Justice Department. A source indicated to CBS News that prosecutors are focusing on potential financial crimes.

On May 16, 2018, Christopher Wylie testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Among other things, Wylie noted that Cambridge Analytica, under the direction of Steve Bannon, sought to "exploit certain vulnerabilities in certain segments to send them information that will remove them from the public forum, and feed them conspiracies and they'll never see mainstream media." Wylie also noted that the company targeted people with "characteristics that would lead them to vote for the Democratic party, particularly African American voters."

On June 3, 2018, a report in The New York Times indicated that Facebook had maintained data-sharing partnerships with mobile device manufacturers, specifically naming Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Samsung. Under the terms of this personal information sharing, device manufacturers were able to gather information about users in order to deliver "the Facebook experience," the Times quotes a Facebook official as saying. Additionally, the report indicates that this access allowed device manufacturers to obtain data about a user's Facebook friends, even if those friends had configured their privacy settings to deny information sharing with third parties.

The same day, Facebook issued a rebuttal to the Times report indicating that the partnerships were conceived because "the demand for Facebook outpaced our ability to build versions of the product that worked on every phone or operating system," at a time when the smartphone market included BlackBerry's BB10 and Windows Phone operating systems, among others. Facebook claimed that "contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends' information, like photos, was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their information with those friends. We are not aware of any abuse by these companies." The distinction being made is partially semantic, as Facebook does not consider these partnerships a third party in this case. Facebook noted that changes to the platform made in April began "winding down" access to these APIs, and that 22 of the partnerships had already been ended.

On July 2, 2018, The Washington Post reported that the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and Federal Bureau of Investigation have joined the Department of Justice inquiry into the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica data scandal. In a statement to CNET, Facebook indicated that "We've provided public testimony, answered questions, and pledged to continue our assistance as their work continues." On July 11th, the Wall Street Journal reported that the SEC is separately investigating if Facebook adequately warned investors in a timely manner about the possible misuse and improper collection of user data. The same day, the UK assessed a £500,000 fine to Facebook, the maximum permitted by law, over its role in the data scandal. The UK's Information Commissioner's Office is also preparing to launch a criminal probe into SCL Elections over their involvement in the scandal.

On July 3, 2018, Facebook acknowledged a "bug" unblocked people that users has blocked between May 29 and June 5.

On July 12, 2018, a CNBC report indicated that a privacy loophole was discovered and closed. A Chrome plug-in intended for marketing research called Grouply.io allowed users to access the list of members for private Facebook groups. Congress sent a letter to Zuckerberg on February 19, 2019 demanding answers about the data leak, stating in part that "labeling these groups as closed or anonymous potentially misled Facebook users into joining these groups and revealing more personal information than they otherwise would have," and "Facebook may have failed to properly notify group members that their personal health information may have been accessed by health insurance companies and online bullies, among others."

On August 22, 2018, Facebook removed Facebook-owned security app Onavo from the App Store, for violating privacy rules. Data collected through the Onavo app is shared with Facebook.

In testimony before the Senate, on September 5, 2018, COO Sheryl Sandberg conceded that the company "[was] too slow to spot this and too slow to act" on privacy protections. Sandberg, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey faced questions focusing on user privacy, election interference, and political censorship. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia even said that, "The era of the wild west in social media is coming to an end," which seems to indicate coming legislation.

On September 6, 2018, a spokesperson indicated that Joseph Chancellor was no longer employed by Facebook. Chancellor was a co-director of Global Science Research, the firm which improperly provided user data to Cambridge Analytica. An internal investigation was launched in March in part to determine his involvement. No statement was released indicating the result of that investigation.

On September 7, 2018, Zuckerberg stated in a post that fixing issues such as "defending against election interference by nation states, protecting our community from abuse and harm, or making sure people have control of their information and are comfortable with how it's used," is a process which "will extend through 2019."

On September 26, 2018, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton stated in an interview with Forbes that "I sold my users' privacy" as a result of the messaging app being sold to Facebook in 2014 for $22 billion.

On September 28, 2018, Facebook disclosed details of a security breach which affected 50 million users. The vulnerability originated from the "view as" feature which can be used to let users see what their profiles look like to other people. Attackers devised a way to export "access tokens," which could be used to gain control of other users' accounts.

A CNET report published on October 5, 2018, details the existence of an " Internet Bill of Rights " drafted by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA). The bill is likely to be introduced in the event the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 elections. In a statement, Khanna noted that "As our lives and the economy are more tied to the internet, it is essential to provide Americans with basic protections online."

On October 16, 2018, rules requiring public disclosure of who pays for political advertising on Facebook, as well as identity verification of users paying for political advertising, were extended to the UK. The rules were first rolled out in the US in May.

On October 25, 2018, Facebook was fined £500,000 by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office for their role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The fine is the maximum amount permitted by the Data Protection Act 1998. The ICO indicated that the fine was final. A Facebook spokesperson told ZDNet that the company "respectfully disagreed," and has filed for appeal.

The same day, Vice published a report indicating that Facebook's advertiser disclosure policy was trivial to abuse. Reporters from Vice submitted advertisements for approval attributed to Mike Pence, DNC Chairman Tom Perez, and Islamic State, which were approved by Facebook. Further, the contents of the advertisements were copied from Russian advertisements. A spokesperson for Facebook confirmed to Vice that the copied content does not violate rules, though the false attribution does. According to Vice, the only denied submission was attributed to Hillary Clinton.

On October 30, 2018, Vice published a second report in which it claimed that it successfully applied to purchase advertisements attributed to all 100 sitting US Senators, indicating that Facebook had yet to fix the problem reported in the previous week. According to Vice, the only denied submission in this test was attributed to Mark Zuckerberg.

On November 14, 2018, the New York Times published an exposé on the Facebook data privacy scandal, citing interviews of more than 50 people, including current and former Facebook executives and employees. In the exposé, the Times reports:

In the Spring of 2016, a security expert employed by Facebook informed Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos of Russian hackers "probing Facebook accounts for people connected to the presidential campaigns," which Stamos, in turn, informed general counsel Colin Stretch.

A group called "Project P" was assembled by Zuckerberg and Sandberg to study false news on Facebook. By January 2017, this group "pressed to issue a public paper" about their findings, but was stopped by board members and Facebook vice president of global public policy Joel Kaplan, who had formerly worked in former US President George W. Bush's administration.

In Spring and Summer of 2017, Facebook was "publicly claiming there had been no Russian effort of any significance on Facebook," despite an ongoing investigation into the extent of Russian involvement in the election.

Sandberg "and deputies" insisted that the post drafted by Stamos to publicly acknowledge Russian involvement for the first time be made "less specific" before publication.

In October 2017, Facebook expanded their engagement with Republican-linked firm Definers Public Affairs to discredit "activist protesters." That firm worked to link people critical of Facebook to liberal philanthropist George Soros, and "[lobbied] a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic."

Following comments critical of Facebook by Apple CEO Tim Cook, a spate of articles critical of Apple and Google began appearing on NTK Network, an organization which shares an office and staff with Definers. Other articles appeared on the website downplaying the Russians' use of Facebook.

On November 15, 2018, Facebook announced it had terminated its relationship with Definers Public Affairs, though it disputed that either Zuckerberg or Sandberg was aware of the "specific work being done." Further, a Facebook spokesperson indicated "It is wrong to suggest that we have ever asked Definers to pay for or write articles on Facebook's behalf, or communicate anything untrue."

On November 22, 2018, Sandberg acknowledged that work produced by Definers "was incorporated into materials presented to me and I received a small number of emails where Definers was referenced."

On November 25, 2018, the founder of Six4Three, on a business trip to London, was compelled by Parliament to hand over documents relating to Facebook. Six4Three obtained these documents during the discovery process relating to an app developed by the startup that used image recognition to identify photos of women in bikinis shared on Facebook users' friends' pages. Reports indicate that Parliament sent an official to the founder's hotel with a warning that noncompliance would result in possible fines or imprisonment. Despite the warning, the founder of the startup remained noncompliant, prompting him to be escorted to Parliament, where he turned over the documents.

A report in the New York Times published on November 29, 2018, indicates that Sheryl Sandberg personally asked Facebook communications staff in January to "research George Soros's financial interests in the wake of his high-profile attacks on tech companies."

On December 5, 2018, documents obtained in the probe of Six4Three were released by Parliament. Damian Collins, the MP who issued the order compelling the handover of the documents in November, highlighted six key points from the documents:

1. Facebook entered into whitelisting agreements with Lyft, Airbnb, Bumble, and Netflix, among others, allowing those groups full access to friends data after Graph API v1 was discontinued. Collins indicates "It is not clear that there was any user consent for this, nor how Facebook decided which companies should be whitelisted or not."

2. According to Collins, "increasing revenues from major app developers was one of the key drivers behind the Platform 3.0 changes at Facebook. The idea of linking access to friends data to the financial value of the developers' relationship with Facebook is a recurring feature of the documents."

3. Data reciprocity between Facebook and app developers was a central focus for the release of Platform v3, with Zuckerberg discussing charging developers for access to API access for friend lists.

4. Internal discussions of changes to the Facebook Android app acknowledge that requesting permissions to collect calls and texts sent by the user would be controversial, with one project manager stating it was "a pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective."

5. Facebook used data collected through Onavo, a VPN service the company acquired in 2013, to survey the use of mobile apps on smartphones. According to Collins, this occurred "apparently without [users'] knowledge," and was used by Facebook to determine "which companies to acquire, and which to treat as a threat."

6. Collins contends that "the files show evidence of Facebook taking aggressive positions against apps, with the consequence that denying them access to data led to the failure of that business." Documents disclosed specifically indicate Facebook revoked API access to video sharing service Vine.

In a statement, Facebook claimed, "Six4Three... cherrypicked these documents from years ago." Zuckerberg responded separately to the public disclosure on Facebook, acknowledging, "Like any organization, we had a lot of internal discussion and people raised different ideas." He called the Facebook scrutiny "healthy given the vast number of people who use our services," but said it shouldn't "misrepresent our actions or motives."

On December 14, 2018, a vulnerability was disclosed in the Facebook Photo API that existed between September 13-25, 2018, exposing private photos of 6.8 million users. The Photo API bug affected people who use Facebook to log in to third-party services.

On December 18, 2018, The New York Times reported on special data sharing agreements that "[exempted] business partners from its usual privacy rules, naming Microsoft's Bing search engine, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and Yahoo as partners in the report. Partners were capable of accessing data including friend lists and private messages, "despite public statements it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier." Facebook claimed the data sharing was about "helping people," and that this was not done without user consent.

On January 17, 2019, Facebook disclosed that it removed hundreds of pages and accounts controlled by Russian propaganda organization Sputnik, including accounts posing as politicians from primarily Eastern European countries.

On January 29, 2019, a TechCrunch report uncovered the "Facebook Research" program, which paid users aged 13 to 35 to receive up to $20 per month to install a VPN application similar to Onavo that allowed Facebook to gather practically all information about how phones were used. On iOS, this was distributed using Apple's Developer Enterprise Program, for which Apple briefly revoked Facebook's certificate as a result of the controversy.

Facebook initially indicated that "less than 5% of the people who chose to participate in this market research program were teens," and on March 1, 2019 amended the statement to "about 18 percent."

On February 7, 2019, the German antitrust office ruled that Facebook must obtain consent before collecting data on non-Facebook members, following a three-year investigation.

On February 20, 2019, Facebook added new location controls to its Android app that allows users to limit background data collection when the app is not in use.

The same day, ZDNet reported that Microsoft's Edge browser contained a secret whitelist allowing Facebook to run Adobe Flash, bypassing the click-to-play policy that other websites are subject to for Flash objects over 398×298 pixels. The whitelist was removed in the February 2019 Patch Tuesday update.

CNET and CBS News Senior Producer Dan Patterson noted on CBSN that Facebook can benefit from this consolidation by making the messaging platforms cheaper to operate, as well as profiting from users sending money through the messaging platform, in a business model similar to Venmo.

On March 21, 2019, Facebook disclosed a lapse in security that resulted in hundreds of millions of passwords being stored in plain text, affecting users of Facebook, Facebook Lite, and Instagram. Facebook claimed that "these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them."

Though Facebook's post does not provide specifics, a report by veteran security reporter Brian Krebs claimed "between 200 million and 600 million" users were affected, and that "more than 20,000 Facebook employees" would have had access.

On March 22, 2019, a court filing by the attorney general of Washington DC alleged that Facebook knew about the Cambridge Analytica scandal months prior to the first public reports in December 2015. Facebook claimed that employees knew of rumors relating to Cambridge Analytica, but the claims relate to a "different incident" than the main scandal, and insisted that the company did not mislead anyone about the timeline of the scandal.

Facebook is seeking to have the case filed in Washington DC dismissed, as well as to seal a document filed in that case.

On March 31, 2019, The Washington Post published an op-ed by Zuckerberg calling for governments and regulators to take a "more active role" in regulating the internet. Shortly after, Facebook introduced a feature that explains why content is shown to users on their news feeds.

On April 3, 2019, over 540 million Facebook-related records were found on two improperly protected AWS servers. The data was collected by Cultura Colectiva, a Mexico-based online media platform, using Facebook APIs. Amazon deactivated the associated account at Facebook's request.

On April 15, 2019, it was discovered that Oculus, a company owned by Facebook, shipped VR headsets with internal etchings including text such as " Big Brother is Watching."

On April 18, 2019, Facebook disclosed the "unintentional" harvesting of email contacts belonging to approximately 1.5 million users over the course of three years. Affected users were asked to provide email address credentials to verify their identity.

On April 30, 2019, at Facebook's F8 developer conference, the company unveiled plans to overhaul Messenger and re-orient Facebook to prioritize Groups instead of the timeline view, with Zuckerberg declaring "The future is private."

On May 9, 2019, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes called for Facebook to be broken up by government regulators, in an editorial in The New York Times. Hughes, who left the company in 2007, cited concerns that Zuckerberg has surrounded himself with people who do not challenge him. "We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well-intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark's power is unprecedented and un-American," Hughes said.

Proponents of a Facebook breakup typically point to unwinding the social network's purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp.

Zuckerberg dismissed Hughes' appeal for a breakup in comments to France 2, stating in part that "If what you care about is democracy and elections, then you want a company like us to invest billions of dollars a year, like we are, in building up really advanced tools to fight election interference."

On May 24, 2019, a report from Motherboard claimed "multiple" staff members of Snapchat used internal tools to spy on users.

On July 8, 2019, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak warned users to get off of Facebook.

On July 18, 2019, lawmakers in a House Committee on Financial Services hearing expressed mistrust of Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency plan due to its "pattern of failing to keep consumer data private." Lawmakers had previously issued a letter to Facebook requesting the company pause development of the project.
Additional resources
Also on July 24, 2019, Netflix released "The Great Hack," a documentary about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

In early July, 2020, Facebook admitted to sharing user data with an estimated 5,000 third-party developers after it access to that data was supposed to expire.

Zuckerberg testified before Congress again on July 29, 2020, as part of an antitrust hearing that included Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Apple's Tim Cook, and Google's Sundar Pichai. The hearing didn't touch on Facebook's data privacy scandal, and was instead focused on Facebook's purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as its treatment of other competing services.

What are the key companies involved in the Facebook data privacy scandal?

In addition to Facebook, these are the companies connected to this data privacy story.

SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories) is at the center of the privacy scandal, though it has operated primarily through subsidiaries. Nominally, SCL was a behavioral research/strategic communication company based in the UK. The company was dissolved on May 1, 2018.

Cambridge Analytica and SCL USA are offshoots of SCL Group, primarily operating in the US. Registration documentation indicates the pair formally came into existence in 2013. As with SCL Group, the pair were dissolved on May 1, 2018.

Global Science Research was a market research firm based in the UK from 2014 to 2017. It was the originator of the thisisyourdigitiallife app. The personal data derived from the app (if not the app itself) was sold to Cambridge Analytica for use in campaign messaging.

Emerdata is the functional successor to SCL and Cambridge Analytica. It was founded in August 2017, with registration documents listing several people associated with SCL and Cambridge Analytica, as well as the same address as that of SCL Group's London headquarters.

AggregateIQ is a Canadian consulting and technology company founded in 2013. The company produced Ripon, the software platform for Cambridge Analytica's political campaign work, which leaked publicly after being discovered in an unprotected GitLab bucket.

Cubeyou is a US-based data analytics firm that also operated surveys on Facebook, and worked with Cambridge University from 2013 to 2015. It was suspended from Facebook in April 2018 following a CNBC report.
Additional resources
Six4Three was a US-based startup that created an app that used image recognition to identify photos of women in bikinis shared on Facebook users' friends' pages. The company sued Facebook in April 2015, when the app became inoperable after access to this data was revoked when the original version of Facebook's Graph API was discontinued.

Onavo is an analytics company that develops mobile apps. They created Onavo Extend and Onavo Protect, which are VPN services for data protection and security, respectively. Facebook purchased the company in October 2013. Data from Onavo is used by Facebook to track usage of non-Facebook apps on smartphones.

The Internet Research Agency is a St. Petersburg-based organization with ties to Russian intelligence services. The organization engages in politically-charged manipulation across English-language social media, including Facebook.

Who are the key people involved in the Facebook data privacy scandal?

Nigel Oakes is the founder of SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. A report from Buzzfeed News unearthed a quote from 1992 in which Oakes stated, "We use the same techniques as Aristotle and Hitler. ... We appeal to people on an emotional level to get them to agree on a functional level."

Alexander Nix was the CEO of Cambridge Analytica and a director of SCL Group. He was suspended following reports detailing a video in which Nix claimed the company "offered bribes to smear opponents as corrupt," and that it "campaigned secretly in elections... through front companies or using subcontractors."

Robert Mercer is a conservative activist, computer scientist, and a co-founder of Cambridge Analytica. A New York Times report indicates that Mercer invested $15 million in the company. His daughters Jennifer Mercer and Rebekah Anne Mercer serve as directors of Emerdata.

Christopher Wylie is the former director of research at Cambridge Analytica. He provided information to The Guardian for its exposé of the Facebook data privacy scandal. He has since testified before committees in the US and UK about Cambridge Analytica's involvement in this scandal.

Steve Bannon is a co-founder of Cambridge Analytica, as well as a founding member and former executive chairman of Breitbart News, an alt-right news outlet. Breitbart News has reportedly received funding from the Mercer family as far back as 2010. Bannon left Breitbart in January 2018. According to Christopher Wylie, Bannon is responsible for testing phrases such as " drain the swamp " at Cambridge Analytica, which were used extensively on Breitbart.

Aleksandr Kogan is a Senior Research Associate at Cambridge University and co-founder of Global Science Research, which created the data harvesting thisisyourdigitiallife app. He worked as a researcher and consultant for Facebook in 2013 and 2015. Kogan also received Russian government grants and is an associate professor at St. Petersburg State University, though he claims this is an honorary role.

Joseph Chancellor was a co-director of Global Science Research, which created the data harvesting thisisyourdigitiallife app. Around November 2015, he was hired by Facebook as a "quantitative social psychologist." A spokesperson indicated on September 6, 2018, that he was no longer employed by Facebook.

Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel are the researchers who proposed and developed the model to "psychometrically" analyze users based on their Facebook likes. At the time this model was published, Kosinski and Stillwell were affiliated with Cambridge University, while Graepel was affiliated with the Cambridge-based Microsoft Research. (None have an association with Cambridge Analytica, according to Cambridge University.)

Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Facebook. He founded the website in 2004 from his dorm room at Harvard.
Additional resources
Sheryl Sandberg is the COO of Facebook. She left Google to join the company in March 2008. She became the eighth member of the company's board of directors in 2012 and is the first woman in that role.

Damian Collins is a Conservative Party politician based in the United Kingdom. He currently serves as the Chair of the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Collins is responsible for issuing orders to seize documents from the American founder of Six4Three while he was traveling in London, and releasing those documents publicly.

Chris Hughes is one of four Facebook co-founders, who originally took on beta testing and feedback for the website, until leaving in 2007. Hughes is the first to call for Facebook to be broken up by regulators.

How have Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg responded to the data privacy scandal?

Each time Facebook finds itself embroiled in a privacy scandal, the general playbook seems to be the same: Mark Zuckerberg delivers an apology, with oft-recycled lines, such as "this was a big mistake," or "I know we can do better." Despite repeated controversies regarding Facebook's handling of personal data, it has continued to gain new users. This is by design-founding president Sean Parker indicated at an Axios conference in November 2017 that the first step of building Facebook features was "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?" Parker also likened the design of Facebook to "exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology."

On March 16, 2018, Facebook announced that SCL and Cambridge Analytica had been banned from the platform. The announcement indicated, correctly, that "Kogan gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels that governed all developers on Facebook at that time," and passing the information to a third party was against the platform policies.

The following day, the announcement was amended to state:

The claim that this is a data breach is completely false. Aleksandr Kogan requested and gained access to information from users who chose to sign up to his app, and everyone involved gave their consent. People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.

On March 21, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg posted his first public statement about the issue, stating in part that:

"We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again."

On March 26, 2018, Facebook placed full-page ads stating: "This was a breach of trust, and I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time. We're now taking steps to ensure this doesn't happen again," in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as The Observer, The Sunday Times, Mail on Sunday, Sunday Mirror, Sunday Express, and Sunday Telegraph in the UK.

In a blog post on April 4, 2018, Facebook announced a series of changes to data handling practices and API access capabilities. Foremost among these include limiting the Events API, which is no longer able to access the guest list or wall posts. Additionally, Facebook removed the ability to search for users by phone number or email address and made changes to the account recovery process to fight scraping.

On April 10, 2018, and April 11, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress. Details about his testimony are in the next section of this article.

On April 10, 2018, Facebook announced the launch of its data abuse bug bounty program. While Facebook has an existing security bug bounty program, this is targeted specifically to prevent malicious users from engaging in data harvesting. There is no limit to how much Facebook could potentially pay in a bounty, though to date the highest amount the company has paid is $40,000 for a security bug.

On May 14, 2018, "around 200" apps were banned from Facebook as part of an investigation into if companies have abused APIs to harvest personal information. The company declined to provide a list of offending apps.

On May 22, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg testified, briefly, before the European Parliament about the data privacy scandal and Cambridge Analytica. The format of the testimony has been the subject of derision, as all of the questions were posed to Zuckerberg before he answered. Guy Verhofstadt, an EU Parliament member representing Belgium, said, "I asked you six 'yes' and 'no' questions, and I got not a single answer."

What did Mark Zuckerberg say in his testimony to Congress?
Additional resources
In his Senate testimony on April 10, 2018, Zuckerberg reiterated his apology, stating that "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake. And I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here," adding in a response to Sen. John Thune that "we try not to make the same mistake multiple times.. in general, a lot of the mistakes are around how people connect to each other, just because of the nature of the service."

Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked if Facebook had determined whether Cambridge Analytica and the Internet Research Agency were targeting the same users. Zuckerberg replied, "We're investigating that now. We believe that it is entirely possible that there will be a connection there." According to NBC News, this was the first suggestion there is a link between the activities of Cambridge Analytica and the Russian disinformation campaign.

On June 11, 2018, nearly 500 pages of new testimony from Zuckerberg was released following promises of a follow-up to questions for which he did not have sufficient information to address during his Congressional testimony. The Washington Post notes that the release, "in some instances sidestepped lawmakers' questions and concerns," but that the questions being asked were not always relevant, particularly in the case of Sen. Ted Cruz, who attempted to bring attention to Facebook's donations to political organizations, as well as how Facebook treats criticism of "Taylor Swift's recent cover of an Earth, Wind and Fire song."

What is the 2016 US presidential election connection to the Facebook data privacy scandal?

In December 2015, The Guardian broke the story of Cambridge Analytica being contracted by Ted Cruz's campaign for the Republican Presidential Primary. Despite Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix's claim i n an interview with TechRepublic that the company is "fundamentally politically agnostic and an apolitical organization," the primary financier of the Cruz campaign is Cambridge Analytica co-founder Robert Mercer, who donated $11 million to a pro-Cruz Super PAC. Following Cruz's withdrawal from the campaign in May 2016, the Mercer family began supporting Donald Trump.
Additional resources
In January 2016, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told investors that the election was "a big deal in terms of ad spend," and that through "using Facebook and Instagram ads you can target by congressional district, you can target by interest, you can target by demographics or any combination of those."

In October 2017, Facebook announced changes to its advertising platform, requiring identity and location verification and prior authorization in order to run electoral advertising. In the wake of the fallout from the data privacy scandal, further restrictions were added in April 2018, making "issue ads" regarding topics of current interest similarly restricted.

In secretly recorded conversations by an undercover team from Channel 4 News, Cambridge Analytica's Nix claimed the firm was behind the "defeat crooked Hillary" advertising campaign, adding, "We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape," and that "this stuff infiltrates the online community, but with no branding, so it's unattributable, untrackable." The same exposé quotes Chief Data Officer Alex Tayler as saying, "When you think about the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million votes but won the electoral college vote, that's down to the data and the research."
Additional resources
What is the Brexit tie-in to the Facebook data privacy scandal?

AggregateIQ was retained by Nigel Farage's Vote Leave organization in the Brexit campaign, and both The Guardian and BBC claim that the Canadian company is connected to Cambridge Analytica and its parent organization SCL Group. UpGuard, the organization that found a public GitLab instance with code from AggregateIQ, has extensively detailed its connection to Cambridge Analytica and its involvement in Brexit campaigning.

Additionally, The Guardian quotes Wylie as saying the company "was set up as a Canadian entity for people who wanted to work on SCL projects who didn't want to move to London."

How is Facebook affected by the GDPR?
Additional resources
Like any organization providing services to users in European Union countries, Facebook is bound by the EU General Data Protection Regulation ( GDPR). Due to the scrutiny Facebook is already facing regarding the Cambridge Analytica scandal, as well as the general nature of the social media giant's product being personal information, its strategy for GDPR compliance is similarly receiving a great deal of focus from users and other companies looking for a model of compliance.

While in theory the GDPR is only applicable to people residing in the EU, Facebook will require users to review their data privacy settings. According to a ZDNet article, Facebook users will be asked if they want to see advertising based on partner information-in practice, websites that feature Facebook's "Like" buttons. Users globally will be asked if they wish to continue sharing political, religious, and relationship information, while users in Europe and Canada will be given the option of switching automatic facial recognition on again.

Facebook members outside the US and Canada have heretofore been governed by the company's terms of service in Ireland. This has reportedly been changed prior to the start of GDPR enforcement, as this would seemingly make Facebook liable for damages for users internationally, due to Ireland's status as an EU member.

What are Facebook "shadow profiles?"

"Shadow profiles" are stores of information that Facebook has obtained about other people-who are not necessarily Facebook users. The existence of "shadow profiles" was discovered as a result of a bug in 2013. When a user downloaded their Facebook history, that user would obtain not just his or her address book, but also the email addresses and phone numbers of their friends that other people had stored in their address books.
Additional resources
Facebook described the issue in an email to the affected users. This is an excerpt of the email, according to security site Packet Storm:

When people upload their contact lists or address books to Facebook, we try to match that data with the contact information of other people on Facebook in order to generate friend recommendations. Because of the bug, the email addresses and phone numbers used to make friend recommendations and reduce the number of invitations we send were inadvertently stored in their account on Facebook, along with their uploaded contacts. As a result, if a person went to download an archive of their Facebook account through our Download Your Information (DYI) tool, which included their uploaded contacts, they may have been provided with additional email addresses or telephone numbers.

Because of the way that Facebook synthesizes data in order to attribute collected data to existing profiles, data of people who do not have Facebook accounts congeals into dossiers, which are popularly called a "shadow profile." It is unclear what other sources of input are added to said "shadow profiles," a term that Facebook does not use, according to Zuckerberg in his Senate testimony.
Additional resources
What are the possible implications for enterprises and business users?

Business users and business accounts should be aware that they are as vulnerable as consumers to data exposure. Because Facebook harvests and shares metadata-including SMS and voice call records-between the company's mobile applications, business users should be aware that their risk profile is the same as a consumer's. The stakes for businesses and employees could be higher, given that incidental or accidental data exposure could expose the company to liability, IP theft, extortion attempts, and cybercriminals.

Though deleting or deactivating Facebook applications won't prevent the company from creating so-called advertising "shadow profiles," it will prevent the company from capturing geolocation and other sensitive data. For actional best practices, contact your company's legal counsel.

How can I change my Facebook privacy settings?
Additional resources Note: This article was written and reported by James Sanders and Dan Patterson. It was updated by Brandon Vigliarolo.
According to Facebook, in 2014 the company removed the ability for apps that friends use to collect information about an individual user. If you wish to disable third-party use of Facebook altogether-including Login With Facebook and apps that rely on Facebook profiles such as Tinder-this can be done in the Settings menu under Apps And Websites. The Apps, Websites And Games field has an Edit button-click that, and then click Turn Off.

Facebook has been proactively notifying users who had their data collected by Cambridge Analytica, though users can manually check to see if their data was shared by going to this Facebook Help page.

Facebook is also developing a Clear History button, which the company indicates is "their database record of you." CNET and CBS News Senior Producer Dan Patterson noted on CBSN that "there aren't a lot of specifics on what that clearing of the database will do, and of course, as soon as you log back in and start creating data again, you set a new cookie and you start the process again."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Facebook data privacy scandal: A cheat sheet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Read about the saga of Facebook's failures in ensuring privacy for user data, including how it relates to Cambridge Analytica, the GDPR, the Brexit campaign, and the 2016 US presidential election.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Supreme Court sides with Facebook in text message dispute

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with Facebook in a lawsuit over unwanted text notifications it sent, rejecting a claim that the messages violated the federal ban on robocalls...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
US federal regulators and more than 45 state prosecutors have sued Facebook, accusing the social media company of taking illegal actions to buy up rivals and stifle competition.

The lawsuits are one of the most significant legal actions the US government has taken against the firm.

Officials are asking the court to consider breaking up the company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp.

Facebook said the deals under scrutiny were approved by regulators years ago.

"The government now wants a do-over, sending a chilling warning to American business that no sale is ever final," Facebook general counsel Jennifer Newstead said.

She said the company had invested millions to make Instagram and WhatsApp successful and would defend itself "vigorously".

"Antitrust laws exist to protect consumers and promote innovation, not to punish successful businesses," Facebook said, describing the government's arguments as "revisionist history".

We're reviewing the complaints & will have more to say soon. Years after the FTC cleared our acquisitions, the government now wants a do-over with no regard for the impact that precedent would have on the broader business community or the people who choose our products every day.
- Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) December 9, 2020

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. View original tweet on Twitter

The lawsuits filed by the states and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) focus on Facebook's 2012 acquisition of Instagram, 2014 purchase of WhatsApp and rules governing outside software developers.

Officials accused Facebook of taking a "buy or bury" approach to potential rivals, hurting competitors and users, who have lost control of their own data to support the firm's advertising revenue.

The legal filings cite internal messages from Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, such as one 2008 email that said it was "better to buy than compete".

"For nearly a decade, Facebook has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users," said New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the legal fight by the states.

"No company should have this much unchecked power over our personal interaction and social interactions. That's why we are taking action today."

It's quite hard sometimes to comprehend just how massive Facebook is.

Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram - all owned by Facebook - all have more than a billion monthly users.

WhatsApp and Facebook have more than two billion.

What the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is arguing is that there's a reason why Facebook came to dominate this highly lucrative sector - it acquired the competition illegally.

In 2012 Instagram was growing rapidly. Facebook was worried.

Zuckerberg has admitted himself previously that Instagram was a competitor to Facebook.

It was bought, for what now seems a ludicrously low figure of $1bn.

WhatsApp too in 2014 was growing at incredible speeds. Was it going to threaten Facebook's own messenger service?

Facebook bought WhatsApp too.

Both of these acquisitions were previously looked at by the FTC and were approved.

That is Facebook's argument - that they bought these companies when they were much smaller - that there was nothing pre-ordained about their success. In other words, don't punish Facebook for building strong American companies.

Whether Instagram and WhatsApp will be cleaved off from Facebook will now be decided in the courts - and these antitrust lawsuits take time.

There will also be ample opportunity for appeals. Don't expect a breakup of Facebook soon.

But this is yet more indication of where the courts and politicians are now headed.

Big Tech is a little too big in many peoples' eyes - and it needs to cutting down to size.

Monopoly claims

The lawsuits come as US regulators are taking a closer look at the power enjoyed by tech companies.

In October, the Department of Justice sued Google, accusing the search giant of violating US competition laws to maintain a monopoly on internet searches and online advertising.

More than 2.5 billion people use one of Facebook's apps each day. The firm, valued at nearly $800bn, employs more than 56,000 people and reported more than $18bn in profit last year.

The Open Markets Institute, a Washington think tank that has been pushing regulators to take a more aggressive stance against tech companies, said the lawsuits were a "critical step" forward.

"There's still more to do, but this is a big moment," the organisation wrote on Twitter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Facebook facing US legal action over competition

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
US federal regulators and more than 45 state prosecutors have sued Facebook, accusing the social media company of taking illegal actions to buy up rivals and stifle competition. The lawsuits are one of the most significant legal actions the US government has taken against the firm.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'I'm Sorry': Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Delivers Opening Statement At Senate Hearing | NBC News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Republican Senator GRILLS Zuckerberg on Facebook, Google, and Twitter collaboration