Based on the number of shares of Facebook stock he owned, company founder Mark Zuckerberg is now worth about $20.3 billion, according to calculations done by CNN.com. Zuckerberg owns 534 million shares of company stock, which opened at $42.05 on the first day of trading on Friday, rising to $45 at one point and then dropping to $38.23 by market close. The up-and-down performance was considered disappointing by many analysts.

Zuckerberg is followed on the new Facebook leader board by Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating office, who is now worth an estimated $1.6 billion with 41 million shares (though she won’t have access to 39 million of those shares until she stays with the company several years and becomes vested).

Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster memorably played by Justin Timberlake in the Facebook film The Social Network, is now worth about $2.6 billion—far more than his bank account ever saw after the whole Napster saga.

Among the other big winners in the IPO are Accel Partners, a venture capital fund led by Jim Breyer that was instrumental in the company’s early investments and which netted $7.7 billion, and “angel” investor Peter Thiel, who put up $500,000 to get Facebook through its first summer of operations and whose 2.5 percent stake in Facebook is now worth around $1.7 billion. Also, investment firm DST Global holds a Facebook stake worth almost $5 billion.

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A day after the historic Facebook IPO, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg updated his status Saturday to “married.”

Zuckerberg wed 27-year-old Priscilla Chan, his girlfriend of nearly a decade, according to a guest authorized to speak for the couple. The person spoke only on the condition of anonymity.

The couple married at his Palo Alto, Calif., home in front of fewer than 100 stunned guests who thought they would be attending a party to celebrate Chan’s graduation from medical school.

Zuckerberg gave his new bride a ring he had designed with a “very simple ruby” to end an incredibly eventful week, according to the guest.

On Monday, Zuckerberg turned 28 and Chan graduated from the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, where she’d studied pediatrics.

Then on Friday, Zuckerberg took his blue-and-white web behemoth public in one of the most anticipated stock offerings in Wall Street history.

The seemingly well-coordinated timing was largely a coincidence, the guest said. The wedding had been planned for months and the couple was waiting for Chan to finish medical school, but the date of the IPO was a “moving target” not known when the wedding was set.

Attendees, including Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, were told after they arrived that they were not mere party guests but wedding guests.

“Everybody was shocked,” the guest said.

The person would not discuss the names of others who attended to protect their privacy.

Ditching his trademark hoodie and sneakers, Zuckerberg sported a dark blue suit and tie with a white shirt for the ceremony, while Chan wore a traditional white wedding dress with veil and lace.

Food was served family-style and included dishes from the couple’s favorite Palo Alto sushi restaurant.

Zuckerberg met Chan at Harvard, where he founded Facebook in a dorm room in 2004, and have been together for more than nine years.

Read the rest of this story on usatoday.com

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Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune dropped $2.2 billion as shares of Facebook Inc. (FB) (FB), the world’s largest social-networking company, fell below the company’s $38 offer price in its second day of trading. The shares sank 11.3 percent to $33.90 at 12:37 p.m. in New York, after declining as much as 13.7 percent to $33. Zuckerberg’s stake is valued at $17.1 billion. He had ranked 26th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index on May 18.

Read the rest of the story on bloomberg.com

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Facebook investors are having Mark Zuckerberg sued for insider trading. Investors were furious when Zuckerberg allegedly sold $1 billion worth in Facebook stocks just before the stock tanked. The stock was overvalued at $38 per share, and Zuckerberg allegedly knew a flaw existed in the stock’s valuation. Those having Zuckerberg sued are small non-institutional investors.

Only a week after the $38 share value and initial public offering (IPO) was released last month, the stock plummeted to $32 a share. Zuckerberg’s unloading of the stock upon the knowledge that he would experience his own substantial losses is what angered Facebook investors to cause them to urge having Zuckerberg sued.

The first lawsuit to Facebook last month was after only large investment companies off Wall Street, such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, had proper notice of the predicted drop. The small investors who were not in the know experienced a $2.5 billion drop in stocks after the IPO was released, a primary reason for having Zuckerberg sued.

Mary Schapiro, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said, “There is a lot of reason to have confidence in our markets and the integrity of how they operate, but there are issues we need to look at specifically with regard to Facebook.”

According to Business Insider, Facebook investors are not the first to have Zuckerberg sued. In July 2010, Paul Ceglia had Zuckerberg sued because their deal to split Facebook ownership was discarded. This was in spite of the $2,000 Ceglia allegedly paid Zuckerberg for half of the ownership.

Zuckerberg was already searching for new ways to earn ad revenue when the number of Facebook Mobile users rose, and the number of ads on the home page dropped. The screen is smaller, so there is less room to show ads, and Zuckerberg did not want to create an obnoxious pop-up. Because ad revenue became low with the increased number of Facebook Mobile users, there was not enough money to support the $38 stock estimate. This lack of information is what caused people to want to have Zuckerberg sued.

Although he strived to make precautions tailored to the predicted drop, Zuckerberg still lost 25% of his profits.

According to The Washington Post, Wall Street aims to maintain good morale with institutional investors. One method to do so is to price a company lower than its worth, so when it experiences a sudden increase while trading, it “pops.”

source: collegenews.com

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Facebook Inc. released its first earnings report since its May IPO, posting a net loss of $157 million, despite posting $1.18 billion in revenue, a 32 percent increase for the company. Executives for the newly public company explained the 8 cent per share loss as the result of stock compensation charges stemming from the IPO. With figures adjusted for those charges, Facebook earned 12 cents a share, on par with the expectations of Wall Street analysts.

Shares for the company continue to drop in value, falling below $24 for the first time following the report. Investors were left unimpressed by the company’s presentation, which focused on new avenues for growth, rather than plans to boost revenue. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 28-year-old CEO, made mention of newly introduced advertising services, and new developments for Facebook’s mobile operations, an increasingly large portion of their services.

“At this early stage of our growth, investment is a top priority as opposed to managing for a target margin,” said Facebook CFO David Ebersman. The company’s capital spending increased by over 300 percent, reaching $413 million during the quarter. Still, with stock value continuing to fall after the troubled IPO, investors are left with mixed impressions.

“The question is, do you get a re-acceleration in the business at some point?” Oppenheimer & Co analyst Jason Helfstein told Reuters. “Because they didn’t give you guidance, you’re going to have to wait to find out what happens.”

A year ago, still acting as a private company, Facebook posted a net income of $240 million, or 11 cents per share. Eight years of constant growth came to a head with the IPO, but the company is still working to get over the hump after initial trading stumbled. In June more than 40 lawsuits had been levied against the company related to technical issues during the IPO, and the stock’s price drop. The Nasdaq Stock Market has planned to hand out $40 million in cash and credit to reimburse investment firms who suffered through opening day technical issues.

Facebook’s stock currently sits at $23.09 per share, a far cry from its $38 per share opening price.

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Facebook Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg might need to talk more often. A 30-minute appearance at a technology industry conference earlier this week has translated into $6.785 billion in additional market valuation for his company.

Facebook shares finished Friday’s regular trading session up 6.2 percent at $22 as Wall Street’s confidence in the company continued to improve in the wake of the 28-year-old CEO’s first public appearance since a rocky initial public offering in May.

The social networking company’s progress introducing a new advertising service that gives marketers improved ways to reach consumers on Facebook also helped bolster its shares, analysts said.

“People are starting to feel a little more comfortable,” said Arvind Bhatia, an analyst with Sterne, Agree & Leach.

Zuckerberg’s comments, in which he highlighted mobile business progress, suggested Facebook could enter the search market and expressed confidence in future money-making prospects, have improved the perception of the stock, said Bhatia.

Zuckerberg has a reputation for spending his time building the company from the inside rather than going around promoting it to investors.

On Thursday, Facebook said its nascent ad exchange was no longer in testing mode, and several advertising agencies reported encouraging early results using the service.

The Facebook Ad Exchange allows marketers to target consumers with pitches based on their past Web browsing activity, such as the websites they’ve visited — a standard online advertising technique that until now has not been available on Facebook.

The ad exchange hints at improved monetization potential for Facebook, said Lazard Capital Markets analyst William Bird.

The world’s No.1 online social network with 955 million users, Facebook has faced a rough debut since its May initial public offering. Investors and analysts have fretted about a sharp slowdown in its revenue growth…

Read more: Reuters

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In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook (FB) from his Harvard University dorm room, hoping to see what his classmates were up to on campus. The following eight years brought international fame, unimaginable wealth, a hit Hollywood movie, a disastrous initial public offering, a sagging stock price—and one unprecedented achievement. On Sept. 14, the company reached 1 billion active users. In an exclusive interview with Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance, Zuckerberg reflected on the milestone and what’s next for his company as it resurfaces from a wave of negativity.

Bloomberg Businessweek: Congratulations on your first billion users. What does this mean for Facebook?
Mark Zuckerberg: The No. 1 value here is focus on impact. We’ve always been small in terms of number of employees. We have this stat that we throw out all the time here: There is on the order of 1,000 engineers and now on the order of a billion users, so each engineer is responsible for a million users. You just don’t get that anywhere else. I was talking to [Facebook board member] Marc Andreessen about this and he said the only two companies that he thought of that had a billion customers are Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.

Microsoft?
That wouldn’t surprise me. It’s really humbling to get a billion people to do anything.

Did you guys think about doing anything with the billionth user, grocery store-style?
I wanted to, but we didn’t want to leak that we got to a billion people. Doing data analytics at this scale is a big challenge, and one of the things you have to do is sample. So it’s funny, we were all sitting around watching us get to a billion users but it was actually just a sample of the users. It’s like you’re not going to try to pull a billion rows from a database, so you’ll pull a sample and project out. I don’t even know if we knew who the billionth person was.

How did you celebrate the moment?
Well, just everyone came together and counted down. Then we all went back to work…

Read more: Bloomberg Businessweek

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If you want to get ahead in the world, you should marry outside of your race.

That’s according to writer Stephen Marche, who made this case in a provocative essay on Esquire.com that attempts to demonstrate that race-mixing is the key to America’s future. Marche points to a collection of statistics that show mixed-race couples—particularly white and Asian couplings—are wealthier and better-educated than their same-race equivalents.

“Biraciality has become a signifier of currency and prosperity,” Marche writes, as evidence listing a few powerful white men who have Asian women as partners—Mark Zuckerberg, Rupert Murdoch and George Soros.

While his argument is compelling, Marche’s reasoning suffers dramatically from the chicken-egg question: Does taking a partner outside of your race somehow magically bring great wealth your way, or do women—particularly Asian women—become more interested in men outside of their race after they become wealthy?

Marche is pleased that the status of mixed-race Americans has significantly improved from their previous condition of being outcasts, not fully accepted by either one of the races to which they might belong. Marche uses statistics that illustrate the dramatic rise interracial marriages in recent years—from less than 7 percent in 1980 to more than 15 percent in 2010.

“Fifteen years ago, the bookstores were full of memoirs about the profound alienation of living as a mixed-race person in America,” Marche writes. “There was The Color of Water and Life on the Color Line and a dozen others that crammed the best-seller lists. One of those writers even went on to become president of the United States. Now the percentage of Americans who feel that the rise of intermarriage has been a change for the better is 43 percent, with the number increasing to 61 percent for the under thirties.”

According to Marche, the increase in mixed-race children is “living proof of the postracial and even postnational state that we are morphing into at an ever faster rate.”

“The president, as a physical presence, is a symbol of mongrel hope. But he’s far from the only such symbol,” Marche says in his piece. “Which Bush do you think has a better chance of showing up on a Republican ticket in 2032 — one of the sorority-approved white-girl twins or the Navy veteran half-Mexican-American son of a governor who took 60 percent of the Hispanic vote in Florida? The number of people identifying themselves as belonging to more than one race jumped 32 percent over the past decade. The number identifying themselves as both black and white rose by a staggering 134 percent. That rise isn’t so much attributable to the rise of mixed-race people as it is to the number of people who choose to identify themselves as such. Biraciality is a desirable status. They know they are the future.”

But while he trumpeted the rise in mixed-race status, Marche also acknowledged that racism in America was still a corrosive force.

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Two years ago, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg  signed The Giving Pledge, a public commitment to give away 50% of his wealth or more during his lifetime or upon his death. The young tech titan just took the next step toward meeting that pledge.

On his Facebook page Tuesday, the $12.5 billion CEO announced that he and his wife Priscilla Chan donated 18 million of his shares in Facebook to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. This comes after Zuckerberg pledged $100 million to Startup Education in 2010 to improve Newark schools.

“Together, we will look for areas in education and health to focus on next,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page. “I’m hopeful we’ll be able to have as positive an impact in our next set of projects.”

The shares have already been donated to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As of Facebook’s $27.71 closing price on Tuesday, the gift is worth a little more than $498 million, making it the largest single philanthropic donation to education this year.

“This is great news for people who are passionate about improving public education,” said Jen Holleran, executive director of Startup Education, which is a supporting organization of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. “Mark’s commitment to dramatically improving the public schools in Newark has been making exciting progress, and we’re thrilled to know that his larger dedication to philanthropy is continuing.”

It remains unclear how the foundation will use the gift. According to its website, the Mountain View, Calif.-based Silicon Valley Community Foundation identifies “emerging challenges in our region” and provides “investment management of the funds individual and corporate donors entrust to us.” In 2011, the foundation had $2 billion of assets under management and had received $470 million in contributions for the year…

Read More:  forbes.com

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Mark Zuckerberg’s private family picture leaked

Facebook’s ever-changing privacy settings are enough to confuse even mogul Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, Randi Zuckerberg.

Randi Zuckerberg posted a photo of her family to her personal Facebook timeline, which shows the group standing around in a kitchen staring at their phones with their mouths agape, with Mark in the background. Little did Randi Zuckerberg know, this very photo (pictured above) would surfaced across the Internet and become an overnight topic of conversation.

Apparently Randi, the former marketing department director for Facebook, did not realize that whatever you post on the internet is basically unprotected, even on sites like a private Facebook account.

Randi posted the photo on her Facebook page, which was then “liked” by her friends, which then generated into her friends’ friends news feed, since Randi’s friends activity indicated they “liked” the picture. Now, if you think that explanation is complicated, you should try reading the Facebook privacy policy.

Once the photo of the Zuckerberg clan was generated onto a mutual friends Facebook news feed, it was taken from the site and tweeted out on Twitter by Callie Schweitzer, a marketing director with more than 40,000 followers. The response from Randi Zuckerberg was not pretty, since she tweeted Callie Schweitzer, “way uncool.” Randi also tweeted, “Digital etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend’s photo publicly. It’s not about privacy settings, it’s about human decency.”

Wow! Someone needs to tell Randi that she is the one to blame for not reading the privacy settings on her brother’s site and the picture is all but incriminating. The family is posed in a beautiful kitchen, fully clothed, with no one flipping the bird or caught scratching themselves in any awkward places. Obviously Randi knows this, or she would not have posted the photo in the first place.

So, what does this mean for Facebook’s privacy settings now that sister Randi threw a hissy fit? Within the next few weeks, more than 1 billion users will start seeing revisions such as new “privacy shortcuts.” If you are a current Facebook user, this probably does not mean anything to you, since you already know that Facebook changes it’s settings every other week, so don’t get used to anything.

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Facebook announced a new “graph search” feature on Tuesday that will answer all the questions that the social network’s newsfeed and timeline do not.

“Today we’re going to take a little trip to our roots,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, in making the announcement.

He described Facebook as a huge database before pointing out that “just like a database, you should be able to query it.” The newsfeed answers the question “What’s going on?” and timeline answers “Who is this person?” But what about everything else? We’ll be able to answer other questions using something called “graph search.”

In addition to launching graph search, Facebook is also incorporating Microsoft’s Bing search results into Facebook searches. Microsoft owns a 1.6 percent share of Facebook.  Running a search on Facebook has often been an exercise in frustration, and graph search may help to change that. Will graph search challenge Google? No, but it could be a start to making Facebook’s nemesis even more nervous, although Zuckerberg emphasized the new tool is “not Web search.”

Graph search is a privacy-aware search, Zuckerberg said. That means that it only searches content which has been shared with you and that your search results will differ from the search results someone else will see – even if you enter the same exact queries.

You can initially use graph search through people, photos, places, and interests.

For example, let’s say you want to play matchmaker for a friend who recently moved to New York City from Germany. You could search for all friends-of-friends who happen to reside in New York City, lived in Germany at some point, and are single. Ta da! You’ll have a list of the ideal matches for your pal. Or perhaps you need to find a dentist. You can easily search for dentists who are liked by your friends.

There was a lot of emphasis on privacy, and Zuckerberg explained that a message will appear on users’ newsfeeds to remind them that they should review their privacy settings. Even though Graph Search is privacy-conscious, some slightly embarrassing content could always come up and haunt you…

Read More: nbcnews.com

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At the end of last year, Facebook  officially became a mobile company, not a desktop one. For the first time in its history, the number of active daily users accessing the service on a mobile device exceeded the number that were checking the social network from their desktop computers. That’s a momentous shift — the company’s most avid users now view it primarily as a tool for their iPhones and Android phones. “Today there is no argument: Facebook is a mobile company,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO,  said on a conference call Wednesday with analysts.

As its fourth-quarter earnings report revealed on Wednesday, it’s also a shift the company is still trying to adjust to. Advertising on smartphones made up 23 percent of Facebook revenue in the final three months of last year, up from 14 percent in the third quarter. Facebook has been trying to accelerate the transition ever since its disastrous IPO (initial public offering) last May, when shareholders slapped the company for underestimating this foundational shift. Over the last few months, Facebook has recovered some ground and overall its earnings report was good. The company reported earnings of 17 cents per share on $1.58 billion in sales in its fourth quarter, handily beating analyst estimates of 15 cents per share on $1.52 billion in revenue. A whopping 1.06 billion people used the service every month by the end of the year, up 25 percent from a year earlier.

Investors were initially spooked by contraction in the company’s operating margin and decline in net income, as spending on research and development, and product development grew. (In  generally accepted accounting principles, net income fell 79 percent year-over-year, to $64 million.) Facebook’s stock is down slightly in after-hours trading, after making up most of the ground it lost in the initial reaction to the report.

Since last fall, Facebook has sold ads on its own mobile applications to other mobile developers. These developers use the ads to promote their own apps and to get users to install them on their phones. Facebook also sells ads in its members’ news feeds, and those ads appear on both the Web and in its mobile apps.

On the conference call, Zuckerberg said the company was working to get better at targeting users with mobile ads tailored to their interests and activities. In her prepared remarks on the conference call, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg argued that the company is well positioned in mobile advertising, since it knows precisely who its customers are and what they like.

Facebook is now clearly focused on making money and justifying the promise of all that hype last year, when the company’s own investment bankers valued the firm at $100 billion. (Today’s closing valuation: $67.7 billion.) Last year the company rolled out Facebook Gifts, an e-commerce tool that allows users to easily give gifts like wine and gift baskets to friends.

Earlier this month, it also announced Graph Search, a fledgling effort to let members navigate their friends’ interests and reviews of movies, books, restaurants, and the like. That potentially positions Facebook to carve out a chunk of Google’s profitable search franchise, and some analysts believe it might amount to a quarter of Facebook’s revenue by 2015.

Analysts were clearly looking for Zuckerberg to shed more light on monetization opportunities for Graph Search but he demurred, saying the focus was first on developing a strong product offering. Yet Zuckerberg is clearly thinking big. He said Graph Search could allow Facebook to create a new generation of social services in markets like recruiting and restaurant reviews, whose current leaders do not have the luxury of knowing their users’ real identity and preferences. Translation: Watch out, LinkedIn, Yelp, and other startups…

Read More: businessweek.com

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Peter Thiel, fhe PayPal co-founder, early Facebook investor and Founders Fund managing partner said there was a famous deal that did not happen and that luck has as much to do with success as anything.

At SXSW this afternoon, the entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and contrarian thinker, told the story of the day Mark Zuckerberg decided to turn down Yahoo’s $1 billion offer to buy Facebook.

“The most important moment in my mind in the history of Facebook occurred in July 2006,” he began.

At the time, Facebook was just two years old. It was a college site with roughly eight or nine million people on it. And, though it was making $30 million in revenue, it was not profitable. “And we received an acquisition offer from Yahoo for $1 billion,” Thiel said.

The three-person Facebook board at the time–Zuckerberg, Thiel, and venture capitalist Jim Breyer–met on a Monday morning.

“Both Briar and myself on balance thought we probably should take the money,” recalled Thiel. “But Zuckerberg started the meeting like, ‘This is kind of a formality, just a quick board meeting, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here’.”

At the time, Zuckerberg was 22 years old.

Thiel said he remembered saying, “We should probably talk about this. A billion dollars is a lot of money.” They hashed out the conversation. Thiel said he and Breyer pointed out: “You own 25 percent. There’s so much you could do with the money.”

Thiel recalled Zuckerberg said, in a nutshell: “I don’t know what I could do with the money. I’d just start another social networking site. I kind of like the one I already have.”

Thiel said the argument Zuckerberg had was  this: ”[Yahoo] had no definitive idea about the future. They did not properly value things that did not yet exist so they were therefore undervaluing the business.”

Thiel told this story to make a larger point about how the most successful entrepreneurs operate. He said that the best entrepreneurs, like Zuckerberg, have a definitive view about the future and plan for it; they don’t willy-nilly chase luck–using statistics, probability, and iterative processes–to stumble upon something, anything that flies.

“All of us have to work toward a definite future…that can motivate and inspire people to change the world,” he said. In this scenario, “luck is something for us to overcome as we go along the way, but not something that becomes this absolute dominating force that stops all thought.”

Thiel doesn’t subscribe to what he calls the start-up “religion” of a-b testing every tweak (until you run out of money) or incrementally-iterating at every step–to be so systematically chasing some random success that it strips out all conviction and creative ideas about the future.

Read More: inc.com

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Facebook announced that it will be rolling out their latest innovation, Graph Search, which allows users to better search the social network and web overall. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg originally announced the feature back in January, and now after 6 months of beta testing it is apparently ready for the masses. While Graph Search will surely prove to be a cool new feature, like with all major Facebook updates it will probably be met with some opposition.  As reported by techcrunch.com:

“Graph Search’s beta version launched in January. At that time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the product as completely different from Web search: “Web search is designed to take any open-ended query and give you links that might have answers. Graph Search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, rather than links that might provide an answer,” he said.

Examples of searches Facebook gave during its launch event included ‘friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter’ and ‘photos of my friends taken at National Park,’ but Graph Search’s beta users have discovered much more humorous (and arguably useful) ways to take advantage of the tool. Tumblr Actual Facebook Graph Searches gives many examples of these queries, including ‘married people who like prostitutes’ and ‘employers of people who like racism.’

Which is what raises the main concern for the tool: privacy. Although this has been a never-ending topic for Facebook and social media platforms, this step may prove to be even more troublesome than the ones that preceded it. According to cnet.com:

“There’s something unsettling about Facebook making an unexpected connection between you and something you’ve shown interest in, and then highlighting that behavior to an undefined group of people. ‘Friends of my friends who like weed,’” is one telling query where you can find potheads in your extended network who probably don’t realize their extracurricular preferences are on display to strangers.

Sure, Graph Search obeys the privacy settings of your posts and Facebook encourages you to view and adjust what groups of people can see your stuff, but those measures won’t prevent embarrassing revelations from surfacing.

Graph Search could act like a wake-up call that encourages people to pay more attention to their privacy settings, cut back on their likes or updates, or leave Facebook altogether. History tells us that a mass exodus won’t happen, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that member attention, especially the attention of tweens and teens, is shifting to other, more private applications, in part because of a fear of being held accountable for incriminating posts or photos.”

Now of course, this is how all new innovations on social media are accepted. First there’s is a major uproar and protest, and even threats to never return to the platform. But then the dust settles and the innovation becomes so engrained into the user experience that people cannot imagine the platform without it. While older generations will harbor more mistrust for a feature like Graph Search, the truth is, the younger generation has a different set of expectations and will probably embrace it. And that’s neither good nor bad, just different. Have you used Facebook Graph Search? Tell us what you think.

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Water vehicles are commonly used to describe the size of companies in business circles. The metaphor indicates the size of the company and its ability to change direction. Big companies are huge cruise liners with massive onboard resources, but an inability to change direction may leave them like the titanic; while small companies with less resources, but less bureaucracy, are able to change direction with the tide and trends, outpacing the bigger companies. But is it possible to become a big company and still be nimble?

Facebook seems to be personifying the latter. Last year the company was being criticized for its lack of mobile strategy and in 12 months they have completely changed direction and proved the critics wrong. In the video above, Thinktank founder Scott Galloway discusses Facebook’s growth strategy and states:

“They have been able to pivot like no other company. They did not have a mobile product couple of months ago and now it is 41% of their advertising revenue, a third of their revenue, and recently they enhanced the facebook exchange. This is a company that is literally able to develop a robust products that impact and move the needle, and it is getting to be a big needle. The speed at which they have managed the transition to mobile is particularly impressive.”

Galloway is correct in his analysis, what Facebook has achieved in such a short period of time is quite impressive. Tech companies are typically known for being more nimble and innovative than other sectors, but Facebook is particularly adamant about it. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been cited in numerous interviews as being committed to keeping a certain company culture, one that is even more innovative than Google. So far, Mr. Zuckerberg and the Facebook team seem to be achieving their goals.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is typically portrayed as being the smartest guy in the room. So it was pretty ironic when a web developer hacked Zuckerberg’s Facebook page to draw attention to a security flaw that he pointed out to the company previously. Khalil Shreateh, an IT expert from Palestine, pointed out the flaw to Facebook team. Yet they ignored the problem, that is, until Khalil used the vulnerability in the system to post on Zuckerberg’s wall. According to techcrunch.com:

“Earlier this week, security researcher Khalil Shreateh discovered a Facebook bug that allowed a hacker to post on anyone’s wall — even if they weren’t that person’s friend.

“While he was able to prove to Facebook that his bug was legit (despite an initial response that it wasn’t a bug at all), Facebook wasn’t too happy with the way he did it: by using the bug to post on Zuckerberg’s otherwise friends-only wall.”

Khalil Shreateh tried to point out the problem to Facebook’s security team initially by posting on one of Zuckerberg’s friend’s account, but after Facebook engineers took a look at what Khalil posted, they determined “this is not a bug.” As reported by theverge.com:

“Shreateh says he tested the vulnerability on Sarah Goodin — a friend of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and the first woman to sign up to the service — before reporting it through Facebook’s whitehat disclosure service for security researchers. The whitehat service rewards researchers with at least $500 for successful bugs. In a copy of an email sent to Facebook, Shreateh explains the details and notes that the security team might not be able to see his test post as Goodin restricts posts to only her friends. Despite attaching a screenshot of the post, a Facebook security engineer, identified only as Emrakul, replied saying “I am sorry this is not a bug,” without asking for additional information.

“Unperturbed by the response, Shreateh decided to notify Mark Zuckerberg himself by posting to his timeline. Minutes later, Facebook security engineer Ola Okelola contacted Shreateh requesting details on the exploit.”

Now that the issue has been fixed, there’s still some controversy over whether Khalil Shreateh should be paid for the bug he discovered. Facebook has a program called ‘white hat’ that pays hackers a minimum of $500 for vulnerabilities they find in the platform. But in order to be considered a ‘white hat,’ the programmer cannot draw attention to the issue by exploiting real Facebook pages—which is what Khalil did. In a statement a Facebook engineer said:

“exploiting bugs to impact real users is not acceptable behavior for a white hat. In this case, the researcher used the bug he discovered to post on the timelines of multiple users without their consent.”

Doesn’t look like Mr. Shreateh is going to get the reward, at least not publicly. Nonetheless, he can gloat that he outsmarted the ‘smartest guys in the room.’

The post Outsmarted: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Page Gets Hacked appeared first on Atlanta Black Star.

Not content with just being a multibillionaire, Zuckerberg is now shifting some of his focus toward social issues. He recently spoke out on immigration reform in the U.S., and now he’s taking on a new project aimed at bringing the Internet to the 5 billion people worldwide who currently don’t have access.

As reported by the nytimes.com:

“On Wednesday, Facebook announced an effort aimed at drastically cutting the cost of delivering basic Internet services on mobile phones, particularly in developing countries, where Facebook and other tech companies need to find new users. Half a dozen of the world’s tech giants, including Samsung, Nokia, Qualcomm and Ericsson, have agreed to work with the company as partners on the initiative, which they call Internet.org.”

The initiative would be a great one, as global Internet  access would help the flow of information, and give voice to people in need. However, it is not completely a selfless act for Zuckerberg and his partners.

According to Cnet.com:

“The motives of Zuckerberg and his partners are not purely altruistic. The goals of internet.org fully align with Facebook’s need to acquire more members in developing countries as growth in the U.S. and Europe has slowed. Facebook has a good start with Facebook for Every Phone, a version of the social network for feature phones that has more than 100 million users, in countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, India and Brazil.”

But Zuckerberg says it is more about making change than making money. In an interview he tells CNN:

“If we … just wanted to focus on making money, the first billion people that we have connected have way more money than the next 5 or 6 billion people combined.  It’s not fair, but it’s the way that it is. We just believe that everyone deserves to be connected and on the Internet.”

“They’re going to use it to decide what kind of government they want, get access to health care for the first time ever, connect with family hundreds of miles away that they haven’t seen in decades,” he added. “Getting access to the Internet is a really big deal, and I think we really are going to be able to do it.”

All of what Zuckerberg is saying is true. It is also true that a company like Facebook would vastly benefit from bringing the Internet to underdeveloped nations because it  is quickly approaching market saturation in the developed ones.

What’s also concerning is that in many of the developing areas people don’t have access to basic necessities like electricity, food and water. So is Internet really a primary concern?

There’s no clear answer to that question, it’s “chicken-and-egg problem.” No one can deny that the lack of basic necessities in developing nations should be addressed, but one could argue that the flow of information could help to better meet these demands and simultaneously give those in need a platform so their problems can be heard.

The post Game Changer: Mark Zuckerberg Aims to Bring Internet to All appeared first on Atlanta Black Star.

Photo sharing app Instagram is arguably one of the coolest and fastest growing applications ever. In two short years, it has gone from nothing to amassing millions of users, eventually being acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. However, while it’s cool for founder Kevin Systrom to focus on user experience, Instagram will have to validate its worth by making a profit, and soon. As reported by gizmodo.com:

“While Instagram is currently ad-free, that looks set to change. Emily White, Instagram’s director of business operations, The Wall Street Journal, which explains that ‘Ms. White said it should be ready to begin selling ads within the next year.’ It’s the first explicit recognition that the photo-sharing network will one day feature ads.

“There’s no set date for ads being rolled out, and for that matter it remains unclear how they’ll make their way into user feeds, too. Indeed, White pointed out to the Journal that the challenge is to ‘figure out how to integrate marketing without jeopardizing Instagram’s cool factor.’”

The cool factor is definitely something to consider when introducing ads. Emily White migrated from Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, so she’s aware of the importance of user experience. She previously worked closely with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and hopes to build a bond with Kevin Systrom, analogous to that of Sandberg and Zuckerberg.

Although there’s no timetable for the ads, they will probably be rolled out with Facebook’s 15-second video spots announced a few months ago. Instagram says it has already identified a host of brands as potential advertisers. But do those brands really need to pay for advertising?

Instagram recently updated the application to allow users to upload video. Before the update, people could only use video shot in the  application itself, but with the introduction of uploads, big brands are already uploading professional 15-second brand content. So why would they pay for something they’re already getting for free?

It will be interesting to see how this transition unfolds. Instagram certainly has the right team in place to make it happen.

The post Show Me The Money: Instagram Ads Are Coming appeared first on Atlanta Black Star.

Most people think of Facebook in similar ways: it’s a place to share photos of your kids, it’s a way to keep up with friends and family members, and it’s a place to share a funny, viral story or LOL cat picture you’ve stumbled upon on the Web.

But this is not how Facebook thinks of Facebook. In CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s mind, Facebook should be “the best personalized newspaper in the world.” He wants a design-and-content mix that plays up a wide array of “high-quality” stories and photos.

The gap between these two Facebooks — the one its managers want to see, and the one its users like using today — is starting to become visible. Earlier this year, Facebook users rejected a redesign that Zuckerberg announced with much fanfare. Now Facebook is adjusting its algorithms to emphasize content that it thinks readers should see, which will push down some of the stuff that’s currently popular.

Over the past two years, according to sources, Vice President of Product Chris Cox and Zuckerberg have been campaigning internally for a sort of “ideal” news feed: It would be part of your daily morning ritual, something that you’d open and scan much the same way you’d read a newspaper.

But what users are clicking on and sharing seems to be quite the opposite. Viral stories and photos produced by publishers like BuzzFeed and Upworthy, or appearing on hosting sites like Imgur or 9Gag, perform exceedingly well on Facebook, garnering tons of clicks and engagement.

The result of the news feed after all that sharing and virality? A sort of tabloidized version of Facebook, where “junk-food stories with LOLcat art” do insanely well and show up more often, as one insider said, while perhaps something like a more labor-intensive magazine feature — or even a decent news story — may surface less often in the feed.

As for imagining the news feed of tomorrow, try to think of it in terms of what the company doesn’t want it to look like: “Chris and Mark absolutely do not want Facebook to be Tumblr,” one source said.

source: allthingsd.com

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Facebook is announcing a new standalone iPhone app called Paper. Contrary to earlier rumors, it’s much more than just a news-reading app — it’s a complete reimagining of Facebook itself. Once you’ve used it, you may never want to open the standard Facebook app again. It might not replicate every feature of Facebook’s main app, but it does fulfill the majority of people’s needs. Simply put, it’s much, much better.

Paper takes the standard Facebook News Feed and re-creates it as an immersive, horizontally scrolling set of screens. It also provides a new way to post to Facebook (and Paper) with an elegant WYSIWYG editor that borrows the styling of Medium’s and Svbltle’s blogging systems. Finally, yes, it’s a news-reading app that owes some of its looks to Flipboard. It will be available for the iPhone in the US (and only the iPhone in the US) on Feb. 3. It’s also ad-free, at least for now.

Paper cuts away virtually all buttons and other UI elements to make every status update, photo, and news story appear full-screen. To get around, you will need to learn a basic set of gestures, but the app will gently remind you what they are if it thinks you’re stuck. Wide photos pan as you tilt the phone (the team cheekily calls it the “Ken turns” effect), UI elements often just fade away, and news stories are presented in Twitter-esque cards.

Paper is the first product to come out of Facebook Creative Labs, a unit within the company tasked to “innovate and build new things,” as Facebook product manager Michael Reckhow puts it. That’s likely a sign that Paper will be just one of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “new and engaging types of mobile experiences” on [Thursday's] earnings call. Since its embarrassing Snapchat clone called Poke failed, Facebook seems closer to figuring out the right formula for its single-use apps. Facebook knows that mobile users are gravitating toward such apps, and it intends to create more of them.

source: theverge.com

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It’s no secret that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks the National Security Agency has overstepped its bounds when it comes to the agency’s surveillance practices, but on Thursday the social network’s chief said he took his gripe directly to the nation’s commander-in-chief.

“I’ve called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future,” Zuckerberg said in an update to his Facebook page. “Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.”

Zuckerberg’s status update comes a day after documents from whistle-blower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA uses an automated system called Turbine to hack into millions of computers. The NSA has even posed as a fake Facebook server to infect a target’s computer, according to The Intercept.

Facebook, Zuckerberg wrote, focuses much of its energy on making its own network secure as well as working to identify flaws in others’ services because the company wants to “keep the Internet strong.” The government, however, is undoing all of this goodwill, Zuckerberg’s remarks suggested.

“I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg has repeatedly sounded off on the NSA since the organization’s covert data collection and surveillance practices were revealed by Snowden last summer.

Source: cnet.com

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Facebook has signed up almost half the countries in Africa – a combined population of 635 million – to its free internet service in a controversial move to corner the market in one of the world’s biggest mobile data growth regions.

Facebook’s co-founder and chairman, Mark Zuckerberg, has made it clear that he wants to connect the whole world to the internet, describing access as a basic human right. His Free Basics initiative, in which mobile users are able to access the site free of data charges, is available in 42 countries, more than half of them in Africa.

But digital campaigners and internet freedom advocates argue that Facebook’s expansion is a thinly veiled marketing ploy that could end up undermining, rather than enhancing, mass efforts to get millions more people connected.

“Even if people are hungry, we shouldn’t be giving them half a loaf,” says Gbenga Sesan, whose organisation Paradigm Initiative Nigeria helps young people living in poverty get online.

“It’s difficult for me to argue against free internet,” he says. But he added that it is problematic to give people only part access to the internet, especially if they believe what they have is full access.

According to the mobile industry trade body GSMA, there will be as many as 700m smartphones in sub-Saharan Africa by 2020. But a handset alone may not get you online, explains GSMA’s head of mobile, Yasmina McCarty.

A person might not have enough money for data, or the government might not have installed broadband cables in the area where they live, she says.

Read more here.

Uganda’s High Court has ordered the closure of a chain of private schools over concerns about poor sanitation and its curriculum.

The Bridge International Academies group says it offers affordable, high-quality education to its 12,000 pupils, who often come from poor families. The Education Ministry says the 63 schools must now close immediately.

The group, supported by foundations such as those set up by Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, says it will appeal.

A judge said the Bridge International school authorities had been given several opportunities to meet the national standards but had failed to do so. The U.S.-owned group first opened its schools in Uganda in 2015, but has been plagued with accusations of poor sanitation, inadequate infrastructure and not following the national curriculum, reports the BBC Africa’s Catherine Byaruhanga from the capital, Kampala.

The government ordered their closure in July also alleging that the schools were recruiting unqualified teachers.
However, the organization decided to go to court to fight the decision.

It insists it follows Uganda’s public education system, with seven years of primary school and children starting from the age of six. Some people who support Bridge International argue that government schools are worse off with nearly 70 percent of children dropping out before they finish primary education, our correspondent says.

Teacher absenteeism is also said to be a major challenge with about one third of teachers not turning up during the school week, she says.

Read more here.

Bill Cosby Legal Team Aims to Block the Jury Form Hearing Accuser Call to Mom: Bill Cosby’s lawyers are working to prevent the jury from hearing accuser Andrea Constand’s call to her mom where she tells her she was drugged and molested in 2004. The attorneys feel the call is “hearsay.” Accuser Andrea Constand and her mom testified about the call in the first trial.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Will Testify Before Congress: According to CNN, Facebook lost trust from users when they revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, were able to access data to target U.S. and British voters. The social media website obtained information from 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge. Zuckerberg accepted the invitation from Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassle to stand trial before Congress April 10.

Donald Trump Hires Former Disney Star to Trump Administration: President Trump added Disney star former Caroline Sunshine to the press team as an assistant. The former “Shake It Up” star interned recently at the White House. She will work alongside the current press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

District Judge Orders Florida Governor to Create Process to Restore Voting Rights to Convicted Felons: U.S. District Judge Mark Walker ordered Governor Rick Scott to dismantle Florida’s “fatally flawed” system to restore voting rights to convicted felons. It will be replaced by April 26.

Alabama Man Who Claims He’s Al Sharpton’s Brother is Being Charged with Murder: Kenneth Glasgow of Alabama, who fatally shot a 23-year-old womanhas been charged. Glasgow claimed he is Al Sharpton’s half-brother, he and Sharpton have worked together in several charity events.

“Boomerang” TV Series in the Works: The classic romantic comedy starring Eddie Murphy will become a TV series thanks to BET. According to Hollywood Reporter, the new half-hour series will explore “contemporary workplace dynamics, including the changing role of gender, office politics, relationships and the conflicts between Generation X and millennials.”

Ted Cruz Grills Mark Zuckerberg About Facebook’s Bias at Court Hearing: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress about the data privacy controversy. Most senators and lawmakers asked the CEO data privacy questions but Ted Cruz asked about the multiple conservative-themed Facebook pages and whether his company took note of employees political views.

Meek Mill Receives Jail Visit from Robert Kraft and 76ers Owner: Patriots owner Robert Kraft and 76ers owner Michael Rubin visited Meek Mill at the Chester State Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania. Both are pushing for his early release from a 2-4 prison term for probation violation. Kraft told reporters outside of the facility, “Amazing young man. I know how I’d feel if I was in the situation he is. Every time I see him, I just come away more impressed. He’s very intelligent. And makes it clear to me we have to do something with criminal justice reform.”

Coachella is being Sued by the Family of Woman Who was Killed on Campsite: According to a lawsuit, Coachella’s negligence caused a woman to be hit by a Jeep Cherokee on her way to the campsite. The parents of the victim said the festival failed to provide temporary pedestrian barricades, fences, lighting, warning signs and other safety provisions.

Chris Paul Becomes a Part Owner of a Minor League Baseball Team: NBA all-star Chris Paul will be a part owner of Winston-Salem Dash, a Class High-A team. The Dash is also affiliated with the Chicago White Sox.

Mark Zuckerberg Will Apologize to the European Parliament: Co-founder of social media website Mark Zuckerberg will appear in front of the European Parliament and will likely apologize for the data breach. He reportedly will say similar statements he stated when he faced the U.S Congress. “Whether it’s fake news, foreign interference in elections or developers misusing people’s information, we didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibilities,” Zuckerberg is expected to say.

Michael B. Jordan Set to Star in Upcoming Animated Series: Actor Michael B. Jordan is set to be the lead voice in Rooster Tooth Animations upcoming futuristic anime-style series “gen:Lock.” Jordan will voice the hero Julian Chase, who is the first pilot for the next generation of mech: giant robots controlled by humans. The show will premiere in late 2018 exclusively on Rooster Teeth’s streaming service.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder Urges FBI to Reject Trump’s Request: President Trump demanded that the  Department of Justice investigate his claims that the FBI spied on his campaign for political purposes. Former Attorney General Eric Holder tweeted about the investigation,”..time for DOJ/FBI to simply say no-protect the institutions and time-tested norms.”

Midterm Primaries Elections: Midterm primaries kick off today across the country.  Democrats could potentially expand to republican states such as Arkansas, Kentucky and Texas. Polls to vote in Georgia close at 7pm tonight.

‘Bratz’ CEO Will No Longer Try to Save Toys ‘R’ Us: Isaac Larian CEO of ‘Bratz’ has given up on trying to save beloved Toys ‘R’ US. Larian told CNN Money that he was unable to reach an agreement with the toy store’s lenders. “I am most disheartened that the legacy of the retailer will be lost for future generations,” Larian said.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) — A major Ethiopian broadcaster says Facebook has shut 20 pages that falsely used its name.

Fana Broadcasting Corporate’s announcement comes as Ethiopians complain that fake news reports in recent months have contributed to mass violence and deaths in some parts of the country.

“Based on our request, Facebook has shut down 13 fake pages in the past week alone. In recent weeks, a total of 20 fake Fana pages that were spreading fake news were shut down,” Mekoya Hailemariam, head editor of Fana’s online publications, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “The pages were using our official logo and mixing our authentic news items with fake ones to intentionally spread misinformation. Some of these fake pages used to have as high as 45,000 followers.”

Ethiopia has one of the lowest internet penetrations in the world with about 15 percent of its citizens having access to the net, according to Internet World Stats. The number of people using Facebook in Ethiopia, is estimated to be about 4.5 million of its 100 million inhabitants.

“There are only a few independent and free media outlets in Ethiopia,” said Befkadu Hailu, a prominent blogger in Ethiopia. “Hence, people are exposed to rumors, fake news and conspiracy theories. As such, they are exploited in many ways.”

Ethiopia’s reformist Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who came to power in April, has relaxed the government’s control of the media, freeing journalists and bloggers who were in jail and unlocking several dozen online media outlets. But Abiy has warned on several occasions that fabricated stories are jeopardizing the public’s peace and security.

“Youths should refrain from taking measures based on misinformation and fake news,” Abiy said in August. “This will only hamper our reform efforts and lead us to failure ultimately.”

The Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, Fitsum Arega, also tweeted in August urging the public to “disregard falsehoods” and stay away from “fabricated stories.”

In recent months, Ethiopians were exposed to fake news reports that sometimes led to violent and deadly events. One video that circulated four months ago purported to show ethnic Oromos throwing dead bodies of ethnic Somalis into a grave. The video was blamed for instigating a violent confrontation.

In another example, fake news reports last week accused the country’s running great, Haile Gebrselassie, of renting the ground floor of one of his buildings in the capital Addis Ababa to security agencies that were torturing people inside. He later dismissed it as an “utter lie.”

This East African nation has cut off internet in several occasions to curb the flow of information, notably during its two recent emergency rules.

Rev. Al Sharpton brought ever-widening concerns about Facebook’s refusal to fact-check political ads to Mark Zuckerberg‘s home directly in what the civil rights activists called a “no-holds-barred meeting” Monday.

Sharpton, who spoke with Reuters in a phone interview Monday, said the meeting at Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto house lasted almost two hours and included other civil rights activists as well as Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Reuters reported.

“We told him that we feel that the exemption for politicians could be used to suppress voting, give wrong messaging and could suppress census taking,” Sharpton told the news agency.

Sharpton said he initiated the meeting through a letter and Zuckerberg, now the company’s chief executive officer didn’t commit to any changes.

“He listened,” Sharpton said. “He made no firm commitments of change but he seemed open.”

A Facebook company spokesperson said in an email to Atlanta Black Star Wednesday that they’re grateful the “prominent leaders of the civil rights community took the time to attend a private dinner hosted by Mark and Sheryl.”

“They discussed a range of important issues and we look forward to continuing these conversations,” the company said.

Zuckerberg, who spoke before the House Financial Services Committee Oct. 23 to discuss plans for the social media giant’s proposed Libra cryptocurrency, was instead held to task on Capitol Hill on a range of issues, including political ads, CBS News reported.

Rep. Maxine Waters weighed in on the topic of Facebook’s politcal ad policy, specifically.

“It seems that a policy that allows politicians to lie, mislead and deceive would also allow Facebook to sell more ads to those politicians, thus making your company more money,” Waters told Zuckerberg during his congressional testimony.

Zuckerberg responded, “The very small percent of our business that is made up of political ads does not come anywhere close to justifying the controversy that this incurs.”

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked if Zuckerberg saw a potential problem with a “complete lack of fact-checking on political advertisements.”

“Well congresswoman, I think lying is bad, and I think if you were to run an ad that had a lie that would be bad,” Zuckerberg responded.

He didn’t directly answer whether he would take down misleading ads.

“In a Democracy, I believe that people should be able to see for themselves what politicians that they may or may not vote for… judge their characters themselves,” Zuckerberg said.

Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk compared Zuckerberg to President Donald Trump.

“You’re both very successful businessmen. You’re both capitalists. You’re both billionaires. You both challenge the status quo,” Loudermilk said. “He calls it draining the swamp. You see it as innovation.”