Facebook

We’re announcing the Facebook Journalism Project: Local News Subscriptions Accelerator, a $3 million, three-month pilot program in the United States to help metro newspapers take their digital subscription business to a new level. The Accelerator will work with 10-15 metro news organizations to unlock strategies that help publishers build digital customer acquisitions on and off our platform. Participating publishers will convene in-person once a month, receive coaching from digital subscription experts, and participate in weekly trainings covering a broad array of digital subscriptions mar

In a new commentary, Facebook acknowledges the possibility that social media can have negative ramifications for democracy. This comes after repeated criticism that it didn't do enough to prevent the spread of fake news that had the potential to impact the 2016 U.S. presidential election. "Facebook was originally designed to connect friends and family – and it has excelled at that," writes Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook's Civic Engagement Product Manager.

Facebook is extending its deadline to close its acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp by one year, to Aug 19, 2015. The original deadline was Aug 19, 2014.

If the transaction is not finalized by Aug 19, 2015, Facebook must pay a $1 billion termination fee to WhatsApp and issue the company the equivalent of $1 billion worth of class-A shares of Facebook common stock. Things are not moving as smoothly overseas at it did with the Federal Trade Commission’s conditioned approval in April.

Facebook requested in May that the European Commission review the deal, hoping to avoid antitrust investigations by several individual countries in the European Union. The EC investigation is still ongoing.

One Billion. That’s how many World Cup-related posts, comments, and likes 220 million people on Facebook have made in the course of conversation since the tournament began on June 12.

Engagement on Facebook around the knockout matches pushed the overall interactions number over the 1 billion mark. Facebook generally sees a large amount of conversation around sporting events, but the World Cup has proven to be a unique moment.

Facebook’s data editors have never measured an event -- sports or otherwise — that has topped a billion interactions.

Our goal is to protect people’s information on Facebook, so when a government requests data, it’s a big deal to us. We have strict policies in place for law enforcement requests and have published these procedures publicly for anyone to review.

Our team scrutinizes each request we receive individually and checks for legally valid and complete documentation from law enforcement. We regularly push back on requests that are vague or overly broad.

Of the 381 people whose accounts were the subject of these warrants, 62 were later charged in a disability fraud case. This means that no charges will be brought against more than 300 people whose data was sought by the government without prior notice to the people affected.

The government also obtained gag orders that prohibited us from discussing this case and notifying any of the affected people until now.

We’ve gone to court and repeatedly asserted that these overly broad warrants -- which contain no date restrictions and allow the government to keep the seized data indefinitely -- violate the privacy rights of the people on Facebook and ignore Fourth Amendment safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures.

We fought forcefully against these 381 requests and were told by a lower court that as an online service provider we didn’t even have the legal standing to contest the warrants. We complied only after the appeals court denied our application to stay this ruling, and after the prosecutor filed a motion to find us in criminal contempt.

[Sonderby is Facebook Deputy General Counsel

On Facebook you can share whatever you want with whomever you want, from a one-to-one conversation, to friends or to everyone. While some people want to post to everyone, others have told us that they are more comfortable sharing with a smaller group, like just their friends.

We recognize that it is much worse for someone to accidentally share with everyone when they actually meant to share just with friends, compared with the reverse. So, going forward, when new people join Facebook, the default audience of their first post will be set to Friends. Previously, for most people, it was set to Public.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll start rolling out a new and expanded privacy checkup tool, which will take people through a few steps to review things like who they’re posting to, which apps they use, and the privacy of key pieces of information on their profile.

Every day, news is made on Facebook. More than one billion people use our platform to discover, explore and participate in news-making events around the world.

Now, we’re excited to announce FB Newswire, a resource that will make it easier for journalists and newsrooms to find, share and embed newsworthy content from Facebook in the media they produce. Powered by Storyful, the leader in social content discovery and verification for newsrooms, FB Newswire aggregates newsworthy content shared publicly on Facebook by individuals and organizations across the world for journalists to use in their reporting.

This will include original photos, videos and status updates posted by people on the front lines of major events like protests, elections and sporting events.

[Mitchell is Director of Facebook’s News and Global Media Partnerships]