The Cambridge Analytica scandal

In the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook has come under increasing scrutiny for the ways its platform can be misused. That scrutiny intensified greatly last month amid reports that a London-based data mining firm named Cambridge Analytica had improperly obtained user data from as many as 87 million people — and that Facebook had failed to confirm that the company deleted the data as promised.

The Federal Trade Commission is now investigating, and Congress is holding hearings. Meanwhile, Facebook faces at least three related crises: the data privacy scandal; the collapse of trust in the News Feed caused by revelations that Russian agents had flooded it with divisive content; and the broader reckoning over social media and whether it is good for us and democracy.

Check back here for the latest developments on this story.