How do websites like Facebook, Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter determine topics that are supposedly relevant to you? Presumably, this is based on how you use their websites, where based on your searches, history, browsing habits, and so on, it will surface information that it thinks is most suitable for you.

Back in June, Facebook announced its own cryptocurrency called Libra. When it was announced, the US government immediately expressed their concerns about the technology. Now it seems that some of those concerns could be related to terrorism, at least that’s the perspective that the US Treasury has.

Last year, Facebook was hit with its biggest scandal of all time when it was revealed that an organization called Cambridge Analytica misused data that Facebook had granted them access to. This resulted in a huge breach of privacy for many of Facebook’s users, which ultimately led to calls to break up the company.

There’s no escaping ads on Facebook and the company uses the immense data that it has on users to enable advertisers to reach the maximum number of people. However, in order to be transparent with users about the ads they see, the company introduced tools like “Why am I seeing this ad?” and Ad Preferences over four years ago. Since the answers users got with those tools were normally vague, […]

Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed may be coming to Oculus virtual reality headsets. A new report claims that Facebook has inked an exclusive deal for this purpose. Not a lot of details are available at this point in time about this deal but it appears to be part of a larger push by Facebook to bring some exclusive games to the Oculus VR platform.

Facebook launched fan subscriptions early last year. Users can sign up for a monthly subscription payment to their favorite creators, kind of like Patreon, in exchange for exclusive content and a fan badge. Facebook wasn’t taking a cut of the $4.99 subscription through the test period but it was going to happen, inevitably. The company has confirmed that it will start taking a cut of fan subscriptions from next year.

Facebook has taken some considerable steps to prevent fake news from spreading on its platform which happens to be the world’s largest social media network. The company has reportedly also built a tool to track fake news about itself and its products. The program is called Stormchaser and it’s used to catch and debunk misinformation about Facebook.

A social media summit without two of the biggest players in social media might not make much sense but apparently, that’s going to be the case for the upcoming summit at the White House. According to reports, the White House has not invited the two most popular social media companies to attend the event.

Have you ever wanted the fame and recognition that comes with being a celebrity? If you do, then you might be interested to learn that according to the UK’s ad regulator, it seems that anyone with a social media following of at least 30,000 people can be technically considered as a “celebrity”.

Cloudflare’s troubles knocked down many sites yesterday for a couple of hours before everything was up and running once again. Today, it’s Facebook and its properties facing a similar issue. Reports have come in from users across the globe that they’re not able to use Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in what appears to be another widespread outage. This is actually the third major outage for Facebook properties this year.

Facebook’s launch of its Libra cryptocurrency was never going to go through without scrutiny from lawmakers. Not long after the ambitious project was revealed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, House Democrats are now calling on the company to put the development of its Libra cryptocurrency and its Calibra digital wallet on hold.

Facebook keeps tweaking the News Feed to ensure that the billions of people who use the social network only see the content that they’re most interested in. The latest tweak has to do with sensational health claims which one can often come across on Facebook. The company says that News Feed will now begin to downrank health content that’s misleading or sensational.

Facebook has taken a lot of flak for how its social network was used to spread misinformation during the previous election. With election season fast approaching, the company is taking steps to ensure that there’s not a repeat of last time. It has now said that ads which discourage people in the United States from voting ahead of the U.S. presidential election next year will be banned.

Facebook brought the Status feature to WhatsApp a couple of years ago after it saw considerable success with it on properties like Instagram and Facebook proper. However, the feature didn’t really take off as much as one would have expected on WhatsApp. Nevertheless, the company continues to push this feature, and it now has the ability to also share your status to Facebook and other apps.