Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of the photo-sharing app Instagram, have resigned and plan to leave the company in the coming weeks, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. The exits add to the challenges facing Instagram’s parent company, Facebook. Mr. Systrom, Instagram’s chief executive, and Mr. Krieger, the chief technical officer, notified Instagram’s leadership team and Facebook on Monday of their decision to leave, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Earlier this summer, John Oliver called Facebook “History’s Most Profitable Data-Harvesting Machine,” which was charitable compared to Sunday night’s 20-minute takedown on the company’s hate speech policies and content moderation, especially in countries that are newly getting online. Oliver compared Facebook unfavorably to toilets, which “make shit go away, whereas Facebook retains shit, disseminates shit to your acquaintances, and reminds you of shit from seven years ago while allowing corporations to put their shit in front of you. What I’m saying is there’s a purity and integrity to toilets that Facebook seriously lacks.”

When Tae Cho proposed to his girlfriend Lindsey Crouch on a Florida beach, he thought the moment would be lost forever. But not only did a kindhearted stranger photograph the romantic proposal, she posted the pictures on Facebook in a bid to find the couple - and it worked. Now the Knoxville duo have Heather Swanner's perfect shots, along with a handful of grainy smartphone camera images taken by family members.

The White House has drafted an executive order for President Donald Trump’s signature that would instruct federal antitrust and law enforcement agencies to open investigations into the business practices of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Facebook Inc. and other social media companies. The order is in its preliminary stages and hasn’t yet been run past other government agencies, according to a White House official. Bloomberg News obtained a draft of the order.

Portal is the company's first device outside of Oculus.

It’s that time again, folks, time to say goodbye to a social media service from days past. Following the shuttering of Klout earlier this year, now Path, the one-time rival to Facebook, is closing its doors, according to an announcement made today.

Facebook will no longer send employees to work at the offices of political campaigns during elections, the company has announced. The social network used to offer dedicated staff to political campaigns to help them develop their online advertising campaigns. Donald Trump's digital director for the 2016 presidential election has said Facebook's assistance helped him win.

Decades of ethnic and religious tensions, a sudden explosion of internet access, and a company that had trouble identifying and removing the most hateful posts. It all added up to a perfect storm in Myanmar, where the United Nations says Facebook had a "determining role" in whipping up anger against the Rohingya minority. "I'm afraid that Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it originally intended," Yanghee Lee, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, said in March .

The most famous entrepreneur of his generation is facing a public reckoning with the power of Big Tech.

On Facebook, right-wing meme pages play a vital role in condensing and recycling far-right talking points and keeping the MAGA base engaged online.

Three decades after her brother's brutal murder, one Oxfordshire woman found his killer - on Facebook.

Facebook will soon pull a mobile VPN app called Onavo Protect from Apple’s App Store, after the iPhone maker declared it violated the store’s guidelines on data collection, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Onavo, which began as an Israeli analytics startup focused on helping users monitor their data usage, was acquired by Facebook in 2013. Its VPN provider then became a data collection tool for Facebook to monitor smartphone users’ behavior outside its core apps, helping inform Facebook’s live video strategy, competition from other social apps, and its decision to acquire companies including WhatsApp.

Moderating billions of posts a week in more than a hundred languages has become Facebook’s biggest challenge. Leaked documents and nearly two dozen interviews show how the company hopes to solve it.

It's more similar to oxygen or drinking water than it is to most technology products. With over 2 billion users visiting its social network every month, Facebook has a group of people logging in that is so large, so diverse, and so geographically distributed that no single company would have dreamed of an audience this big even just a decade ago. The only company that even comes close today is Google, which has eight products with over a billion users--Google search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Chrome, Android, Google Play, and Google Drive. But naturally, most of those are the same users using multiple Google services.

Facebook’s share price fell over 20 percent in after-hours trading today after the company announced its slowest-ever user growth rate and a scary warning that its revenue growth would rapidly decelerate. Before today’s brutal Q2 earnings, Facebook’s share price closed today at $217.50 – a record high — but fell to around $172 after the earnings call. That’s a market cap drop of roughly $123 billion. In two hours, Facebook lost more value than most startups and even public companies are ever worth.

Reuters found more than 1,000 examples of content attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims on Facebook. A secretive operation to combat the vitriol has failed to stop it.

As one of the most popular websites in the world, and as — according to Statista — the leading global social network, Facebook may have changed the way we maintain social relationships. An issue of contention, however, remains. Relatively little is known about how heavy Facebook usage, and potential addiction, affects the human brain.

A court in Vietnam Thursday sentenced an environmental campaigner to 20 years in jail for content posted to Facebook — marking a significant escalation in the government’s use of social media to crack down on free speech. Le Dinh Luong, 53, was found guilty of attempting to overthrow the Communist government after a trial that lasted just five hours. The prosecutor claimed Luong was encouraging people to join the pro-democracy group Viet Tan, which the government labels a terrorist organization.

Facebook Inc.’s Instagram is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion, if it were a stand-alone company, marking a 100-fold return for the app purchased in 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence.

From now until November, every Apple News user in the US will see a curated section of stories about the midterm elections.

New data shows the impact of Facebook’s pullback from an industry it had dominated (and distorted).

Facebook, Google and Microsoft push users away from privacy-friendly options on their services in an "unethical" way, according to a report by the Norwegian Consumer Council. It studied the privacy settings of the firms and found a series of "dark patterns", including intrusive default settings and misleading wording. The firms gave users "an illusion of control", its report suggested. Both Google and Facebook said user privacy was important to them.

When the young Mark Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto in 2004, he and his buddies built a corporate proto-culture that continues to influence the company today.

Gotta hear both sides (of the Martian NASA-slavery debate).

Facebook says it will not remove fake news from its platform because it does not violate its community standards. The social network is currently running an advertising campaign in the UK that declares "fake news is not our friend". But it said publishers often had "very different points of view" and removing fabricated posts would be "contrary to the basic principles of free speech". Instead, it says posts that it deems to be fake news will be "demoted" in the news feed.

The unchecked power of telecom giants that want to compete with tech companies creates a perfect storm for privacy violations.

The now infamous Facebook data set on tens of millions of Americans gathered by a Cambridge University scientist for a firm that went on to work for Donald Trump's 2016 campaign was accessed from Russia, a British member of parliament tells CNN. Damian Collins, the Conservative MP leading a British parliamentary investigation into online disinformation, told CNN that a British investigation found evidence that the data, collected by Professor Aleksandr Kogan on behalf of Cambridge Analytica, had been accessed from Russia and other countries.

Context cards could help Facebook fight misinformation

Facebook failed to add North American daily active users and lost European daily active users in the second quarter, amid data leaks, privacy changes and fake news scandals, the company reported Wednesday. In its second-quarter earnings report, Facebook said North American daily active users (DAUs) remained at 185 million, the same as the prior quarter. Analysts were expecting 185.4 million, according to FactSet.

For many of the world’s richest people, losing $15.1 billion in five minutes would be a wipeout. For Mark Zuckerberg, it’s just about a sixth of his net worth. His fortune tumbled 17 percent in the first five minutes of trading Thursday, as shares of the social media giant slid 18 percent on disappointing second-quarter results. If that holds through the close, he’ll slide to sixth place from third on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world’s 500 richest people. It would also wipe out his $13.7 billion of gains for the year, leaving him with about $71 billion.

The Facebook CEO holds all the power within his company. His ambivalence about wielding it may point to a worrying malaise. By John Naughton.

Last year, we launched an investigation into how Facebook’s People You May Know tool makes its creepily accurate recommendations. By November, we had it mostly figured out: Facebook has nearly limitless access to all the phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, and social media handles most people on Earth have ever used. That, plus its deep mining of people’s messaging behavior on Android, means it can make surprisingly insightful observations about who you know in real life—even if it’s wrong about your desire to be “friends” with them on Facebook.

A new market study from research firm SimilarWeb revealed that YouTube is on track to surpass Facebook in traffic to become the second largest website in the United States. Since Google has long retained the position of the nation’s largest site and YouTube has been a Google subsidiary since 2006, YouTube overtaking Facebook will mean spots No. 1 and No. 2 will belong to Google companies.

Facebook has taken down pages, groups and accounts it identified as part of a coordinated disinformation campaign that originated in Iran and targeted countries around the world. It also found a number of new pages connected to Russia.

More needs to be done to stop small social media websites being exploited by extremists, experts have said. The likes of Facebook and Twitter have responded to calls to remove extremist content over the last 18 months. And some smaller social media sites have joined a scheme where information is shared to enable blocking content.