Microsoft, Facebook, and the telecoms infrastructure company Telxius have announced the completion of the highest capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic Ocean. The cable is capable of transmitting 160 terabits of data per second, the equivalent of streaming 71 million HD videos at the same time, and 16 million times faster than an average home internet connection, Microsoft claims. The cable will be operational by early 2018.

Nine days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “crazy” the idea that fake news on his company’s social network played a key role in the U.S. election, President Barack Obama pulled the youthful tech billionaire aside and delivered what he hoped would be a wake-up call. For months leading up to the vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse.

It Zucks! By John Lanchester.

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook says the company will provide the contents of 3,000 ads bought by a Russian agency to congressional investigators.

If Facebook’s algorithms were executives, the public would be demanding their heads on a stick, such was the ugly incompetence on display this week. First, the company admitted a “fail” when its advertising algorithm allowed for the targeting of anti-Semitic users. Then on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg said he was handing over details of more than 3,000 advertisements bought by groups with links to the Kremlin, a move made possible by the advertising algorithms that have made Mr Zuckerberg a multi-billionaire.

Donald Trump has attacked the escalating investigations into 3,000 adverts purchased on Facebook by Russians in the 2016 US presidential, using Twitter early Friday to say the “Russia hoax continues, now it’s ads on Facebook”. He repeated his attacks on the “biased and dishonest” media coverage that he said favored his rival Hillary Clinton.

On Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined nine steps that Facebook would take to "protect election integrity" and "make sure Facebook is a force for good in democracy," including the delivery of $100,000-worth of Russia-linked ads to government officials and investigators. “I care deeply about the democratic process and protecting its integrity," he said during a live broadcast on his Facebook page. "I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine our democracy.”

The web is not as open as it once was, with nation-states exerting their power over the internet. Facebook and other tech companies are dealing with the consequences.

There's a whole industry dedicated to producing fake US news in Macedonia – and it's getting ready for 2020

Legal experts say the revelation has enormous implications for the trajectory of Mueller's investigation into Russia's election interference.

Several months ago, I turned off notifications from Facebook on my phone. Last week, I went ahead and removed the Facebook app from my phone. Now, I genuinely enjoy Facebook. I use it for keeping up with with my family and my IRL friends, who are spread out all over the world.

The company told congressional investigators that it has discovered it sold ads totaling $100,000 to a Russian firm.

A thriving ecosystem of websites that allow users to automatically generate millions of fake "likes" and comments on Facebook has been documented by researchers at the University of Iowa. Working with a computer scientist at Facebook and one in Lahore, Pakistan, the team found more than 50 sites offering free, fake "likes" for users' posts in exchange for access to their accounts, which were used to falsely "like" other sites in turn.

Even though he was once an executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings, favors investing in Amazon instead, he told CNBC's "Fast Money: Halftime Report" on Thursday. President Donald Trump has been a critic of Amazon, tweeting his disdain for coverage from The Washington Post, which is a personal holding of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. But Palihapitiya said he thinks that Facebook and Google face more regulatory risk, given the many retailers that compete with Amazon.

The Facebook administration removed up to 80 percent of groups connected with the Internet Research Agency, known as the ‘Troll factory’. A source close to the company's management told this The Bell. The social network removed 25 groups, which had over three million followers in total. Another 32 accounts with two million subscribers were closed in Instagram. About 50 accounts were blocked by the Twitter administration, which had the 600 thousand followers in total.

Forget China, the Internet police are already here in U.S. By Philip Giraldi.

When you open Facebook on Monday, a special message about the 2017 total solar eclipse will promote NASA's live-streaming video feeds.

Facebook has been accused of 'absurd political correctness' after it censored photos of classic works of art because they contained nudity. The subject matter included 19th century paintings depicting naked women and bare breasted aboriginal woman. Images of the work had been uploaded to Facebook by an auction house to promote an upcoming sale.

Facebook added an additional defense today against the spread of fake news and viral hoaxes. If a Facebook page is found to be repeatedly sharing false stories, the company will ban the page from advertising on Facebook. The company uses third-party fact-checking organizations to flag stories that are false. Under Facebook’s rules, advertisers are already not allowed to run ads that link to false stories, but this new update takes that ban a step further.

The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Competition From Startups,Read most current stock market news, Get stock, fund, etf analyst reports from an independent source you can trust - Morningstar

In his book 1984, George Orwell detailed a dystopian world wherein a person or persona called “Big Brother” saw everything that people did and where the central government pushed its agenda through propaganda, spying, monitoring, and thought controls. That book was published in 1949.

A campaign finance reform group, accusing Facebook of being used as an “accomplice” in a Russian influence scheme, is calling on company chairman Mark Zuckerberg to reverse his position and publicly release “secretly-sponsored” Russian political ads that ran on its platform during last year’s presidential

Facebook and Google have decided to participate in the 'Internet-wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality' protest scheduled for July 12 in the US. Being organized by Advocacy groups Fight for the Future, Free Press, and Demand Progress, the 'Day of Action' has already received support from Amazon, Netflix and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), among others.

We haven't had a major new technology company in more than 10 years.

Mark Zuckerberg’s travels throughout the United States to fulfill his 2017 “personal challenge” to “learn about people’s hopes and challenges” have seen him drive a tractor, meet recovering heroin addicts, don a hard hat and speak out against the staggering wealth inequality that his $68.5bn fortune so clearly represents. But to Nicole, a worker in one of Facebook’s cafeterias, they have also raised an important question: “Is he going to come here?”

Free Basics, built for developing markets, focuses on ‘western corporate content’ and violates net neutrality principles, researchers say

In recent weeks, a story about experimental Facebook machine learning research has been circulating with increasingly panicky, Skynet-esque headlines....

Facebook is debuting a YouTube competitor called “Watch” that lets you subscribe to shows inside Facebook’s apps and desktop site and watch them in a dedicated tab. Watch will roll out in the US with a few dozen shows tomorrow, but it will eventually go global and feature thousands of series.

America has held a largely romantic view of the tech industry that is at odds with reality.

Fake news, it's a big deal on Facebook, and we might just be getting more of it in the form of videos. Facebook recently bought a startup with an expertise in video manipulation, Deutsche Startups reported. The German-based startup Fayteq has software that is able to remove or add objects in videos, even live ones, and add effects to them.

An activist in Thailand has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison after confessing to posting a BBC article on his Facebook account that has been deemed insulting to the nation's monarchy, a rights group said Tuesday. Jatupat Booyapatraksa, 26, was found guilty Tuesday of violating the country's strict lèse-majesté law, which criminalizes all perceived insults to royal family, a representative of Thai legal monitoring group iLaw tells TIME.

This month, one of the most important intelligence documents about Russian interference in the US election emerged.

How Facebook censors what its users see has been revealed by internal documents, the Guardian newspaper says. It said the manuals revealed the criteria used to judge if posts were too violent, sexual, racist, hateful or supported terrorism. The Guardian said Facebook's moderators were "overwhelmed" and had only seconds to decide if posts should stay.

Lobbyists for Google, Facebook, and other websites are trying to stop the implementation of a proposed law that would strengthen consumer privacy protections online. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) last week proposed a bill that would require broadband providers and websites to obtain users' opt-in consent before they use Web browsing history and application usage history for advertising and other purposes or before they share that information with other entities.

Share Lab uses flow charts and data analysis to map one of the greatest forces shaping our world - Facebook.