Sarah Frier

Bill Russo, a Biden campaign spokesman,  lashed out at Facebook, alleging that the social media giant is “shredding the fabric of our democracy” in the aftermath of the election. “In the days after Election Day, Facebook is flooded with thousands of calls for violence,” Russo said in a tweet. “Some of them are taken down, but many are left up for hours, if not days.” Russo also cited theories about a fraudulent U.S.

As the country’s most powerful newsmaker and the person in charge of a government that’s been aggressively pursuing antitrust cases against big tech companies, President Donald Trump does have leverage over Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. So the chief executive officer could be forgiven for flattering President Trump.

It’s been almost exactly a year since news broke that Facebook had allowed the personal data of tens of millions of users to be shared with Cambridge Analytica, a consulting company affiliated with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. That revelation sparked an investigation by the Justice Department into the company's data-sharing practices, which has broadened to include a grand jury.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has boasted often that it made better use of Facebook’s advertising tools than Hillary Clinton’s campaign did. An internal Facebook white paper, published days after the election, shows the company’s data scientists agree. "Trump’s FB campaigns were more complex than Clinton’s and better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize for outcomes," the author of the internal paper wrote, citing revenue of $44 million for Trump and $28 million for Clinton in that period.

Facebook is struggling to stamp out fake news. The company outsources the process to third-party fact checkers who can only tackle a small fraction of the bogus news that floods the social network, according to interviews with people involved in the process. And screenshots obtained by Bloomberg reveal a process that some partners say is too cumbersome and inefficient to stop misinformation duplicating and spreading. “There is no silver bullet," Facebook said. "This is part of a multi-pronged approach to combating false news.

Google Chief Executive Officer Larry Page, not known for his public speaking, zeroed in on a timely subject when he addressed privacy at Allen & Co.’s annual dealmaking retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Page, whose company makes money gathering data on users’ Internet behavior, will collect more information with release of wearables such as Google Glass. At his July 9 talk, he made the case that Google takes privacy very seriously and described how the world’s most-popular search engine thinks about it as a problem to solve, according to people who were there.