Facebook

Advertisers will be required to provide verifiable public contact details before they can run political campaigns on Facebook, in the latest attempt by the social network to increase accountability for so-called dark adverts. The move is part of a raft of changes in the buildup to the European elections in May, when citizens from across the European Union will vote in new Members of the European Parliament. Facebook’s political advertising restrictions will launch in the EU27 on March 29, following partial rollouts in six countries including the UK, US and India.

We’re announcing the expansion of a new local section on Facebook called “Today In” and starting a test for local alerts from relevant government pages. Today In connects people to local news and information about their community. It is now available in over 400 cities in the US, and we have launched our first international test in Australia. In addition, we have started testing Today In in communities located in news deserts, places that have low supply of local news and community information, by supplementing with relevant content from surrounding areas.

The Facebook data of up to 87 million people – 37 million more than previously reported – may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, the company has revealed. This larger figure was buried in the penultimate paragraph of a blogpost by the company’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, published April 4, which also provided updates on the changes Facebook was making to better protect user information.

[Press release] This was a breach of trust between Cambridge University Researcher Aleksandr Kogan, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that. We already took the most important steps a few years ago in 2014 to prevent bad actors from accessing people's information in this way. But there's more we need to do and I'll outline those steps here: