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Facebook can make ad campaigns sit in limbo for days while it goes through a stringent review process, leaving marketers to wonder if they will ever publish.

The social network’s quasi-independent Oversight Board has voted to uphold his ban from the platform after his account was suspended four months ago for inciting violence that led to the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot. But the board said Facebook must reassess the penalty because it imposed it “indefinitely.”

Facebook hit 2.85 billion monthly active users, or MAUs, last quarter (up 10%) and 1.88 billion daily users (up 8%) as ad-driven revenue surged 48% to $26.2 billion, crushing forecasts. Earnings per share of $3.30 — up 93% – were also a beat as the social media giant’s advertising muscle powers through the cloud of antitrust lawsuits, Congressional critics and heat from Apple CEO Tim Cook — as the tech giants report dueling quarterly earnings Wednesday afternoon.

Usually, when social media executives are brought to testify in front of Congress, the hearings are centered on specific policies and types of content, misinfo and foreign interference, antitrust issues, and privacy concerns. What doesn’t quite get as much attention are the engines that drive these platforms: their algorithms. That’s what makes Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary hearing with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube different. The hearing is entirely focused on social media algorithms.

NAB General Counsel Rick Kaplan: “The FCC should not simply saddle broadcasters with this needless obligation — or rather, multiple needless obligations — because it can regulate broadcasters but not social media companies. That is regulation at its worst, and it should not make a return. If the commission can’t address a widespread problem that occurs almost exclusively on other platforms, why not ask Congress to step in with regulations that actually meet the problem rather than reflexively burdening over-the-air broadcasters? If anything, the Commission should be reticent to add burdens on one industry that are wildly asymmetrical to the regulation of other industries and that will barely address the actual problem.”

To tap into the burgeoning online video streaming marketplace, Facebook today introduced a new advertising unit formatted specifically to promote subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services via Facebook’s feeds. The new units, dubbed “Dynamic Ads for Streaming,” or DAS, are aimed at film and/or TV streaming advertisers, enabling them to automatically generate unique ads for each of their titles without the need to configure individual ads.

The chief executives of Twitter, Alphabet and Facebook (l-r: Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg) will appear before a House panel, where they will face questions about social media’s role in fomenting discord and their decisions to suspend or ban former President Trump.

NBCUniversal and Facebook unveiled a new partnership that will put e-commerce pitches from the TV company’s clients on Facebook and Instagram, part of an ongoing bid by the Comcast media conglomerate to cultivate a new set of advertising clients. Under the new pact, NBCUniversal e-commerce clients will be able to make outreach to users on Facebook and Instagram, utilizing content related to NBCUniversal’s shows and stars.

TVNewsCheck‘s Michael Depp and writer Paige Albiniak look at Facebook’s ongoing primacy for TV station groups in their social media efforts, though the relationship has evolved and monetization hopes tempered. Read Albiniak’s story on stations and social media here.

Facebook overwhelmingly is the most important social media platform for TV stations, say executives for CBS stations, E.W. Scripps, Nexstar, NBCU stations, Fox stations and Meredith. Broadcasters’ relationship with the platform once widely viewed as a “frenemy” continues to evolve, though the opacity of its all-important algorithm still frustrates. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

The deal with News Corp follows a standoff over legislation passed by the Australian government to compensate publishers.

Facebook and Google’s market power, especially over digital advertising, has translated to a potential “extinction level event” for local news operations, broadcast, online and print. That was the underlying message of House Antitrust Subcommittee chairman David Cicilline (D-R.I.) at a hearing Friday on “Saving a Free and Diverse Press.”

Lobbyists for Facebook and Google threw their weight against new U.S. legislation that seeks to aid struggling news publishers by allowing them to negotiate collectively against the tech companies over revenue sharing and other deals. Google, which declined comment on the proposal, launched a website on Thursday asserting it is “one of the world’s biggest financial supporters of journalism” by virtue of the ad revenue and content licensing fees it provides to media.

Facebook is asking a D.C. federal judge to dismiss two government suits that allege its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp gave it a monopoly on the personal social networking market in violation of antitrust laws — arguing that such a claim “utterly ignores the reality of the dynamic, intensely competitive high-tech industry in which Facebook operates.”

Facebook will resume allowing political advertising on its platform starting Thursday, ending a freeze that was put in place around the general election. “We put this temporary ban in place after the November 2020 election to avoid confusion or abuse following Election Day,” the company wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Facebook confirmed that they have agreed on amendments to proposed legislation to require the social network and Google to pay for Australian news that they feature. Facebook’s cooperation is a major victory in Australian efforts to make the two gateways to the Internet pay for the journalism that they use.

A coalition of trade organizations filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Maryland state government over passage of a bill that imposes a tax on digital ad revenue. The Computer & Communications Industry Association, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Internet Association, sued Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot (D). CCIA’s members include Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google and Uber.

Australia’s government has condemned Facebook over its suprise move to prevent Australians sharing news that had also blocked some government communications. The digital platforms fear that what’s happening in Australia will become an expensive precedent for other countries as governments revamp laws to catch up with the fast changing digital world.

The social network, which has a history of cloning its competitors, has started working on an audio chat product.

Facebook today unveiled new actions it’s taking to fight the spread of misinformation about COVID-19, including vaccines to prevent it. The effort includes an expansion of the types of false claims that will be removed from Facebook and Instagram including a) that COVID-19 is man-made; b) that vaccines are not effective at preventing it; c) that it’s safer to get the disease than to get vaccinated; and d) that vaccines are dangerous or cause autism.

Facebook has dominated app-based messaging for the last five years with its homegrown Messenger services and WhatsApp, which it bought in 2014. During this time would-be rivals like Signal and Telegram have largely failed to break out beyond a niche group of privacy-based users — but, in the last six months, all that has changed. Indeed, the number of monthly downloads of Telegram and Signal has skyrocketed since October and, in January, surpassed the popular Facebook apps.

“There is no longer a competitive market in which newspapers can fairly compete for online advertising revenue,” the owner of The Charleston Gazette-Mail and other West Virginia news publications said in a lawsuit in federal court on Friday. It accuses the companies of profiting from “anticompetitive and monopolistic practices” that have damaged the newspaper business.

Despite topping analysts’ sales and earnings expectations for the fifth time in its last six quarters, Facebook’s stock price took a minor hit on Wednesday afternoon, after the company warned in its Q4 financial report it’s facing “significant uncertainty” moving into 2021. From a financial standpoint, Facebook’s earnings per share of $3.88 easily beat Wall Street’s expectations of $3.24 EPS; the company’s $28.07 billion in Q4 revenue also topped estimates of $26.43 billion.

Facebook and Amazon topped all other U.S. companies in federal lobbying expenditures last year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the most recent disclosures. It was the second straight year they outspent all other companies, including stalwarts such as AT&T and Boeing.

Facebook is halting all political spending until at least next quarter, company communications director Andy Stone confirmed Monday. The decision comes after Facebook indefinitely suspended President Trump from its platform last week, following the violent riots at the U.S. Capitol.

Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that outgoing president Donald Trump is “indefinitely” banned from Facebook and Instagram. The indefinite banning comes one day after the Capitol came under siege by a group of the president’s supporters, sending lawmakers into a lockdown and leaving four people dead.

Facebook Pages has had a makeover. One of the most dramatic changes is the elimination of the “Like” button. The social network explains that rather than focusing on approval or disapproval with a “Like” button, the change will focus on Followers, a more direct measurement of how the page connects with people.

On Wednesday, in an unprecedented step, the two companies temporarily suspended Trump from posting to their platforms after a mob of his supporters stormed the house of Congress. It was the most aggressive action either company has yet taken against Trump, who more than a decade ago embraced the immediacy and scale of Twitter to rally loyalists, castigate enemies and spread false rumors.

Facebook and Google agreed to “cooperate and assist one another” if they ever faced an investigation into their pact to work together in online advertising, according to an unredacted version of a lawsuit filed by 10 states against Google last week.

The social media company joins the antitrust effort against the iPhone maker, claiming that changes to the iOS that block targeted advertising that Facebook specializes in is an assault on small businesses.

Facebook will allow political advertisements related to the Georgia Senate runoffs starting Wednesday, partially lifting a post-election ban. The company announced Tuesday that advertisers who have completed Facebook’s ad authorizations process will be able to begin running them again.

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday voted to issue orders to nine major internet platforms requiring information about how they handle data for a new study. The orders, which do not implicate any legal wrongdoing, were sent to Amazon, ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok), Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, WhatsApp and Youtube. The agency is requesting information about how the platforms collect, use, track or estimate personal and demographic information.

The Federal Trade Commission has frozen pay and hiring, explored ways of shrinking its staff, and may need to bring fewer expensive cases, its executive director says in internal emails.

The U.S. and states cases against the social network are far from a slam dunk because the standards of proof are formidable.