Now its time for World Business report. Two billion friends, soaring profits and a big thumbs up from wall street. But how much bigger can facebook grow . Plus made in america. President trump hails a 10 billion taiwanese investment as proof hes making a difference. But one critic calls the deal a corporate welfare package. Welcome to World Business report. Im ben bland. Also coming up charged up samsungs on track for record annual profits as it puts the Exploding Phones scandal behind it. We start in Silicon Valley where it seems there is no stopping the worlds biggest social network. Facebook has seen another huge jump in profits as Advertising Revenues keep on rising lets show you just how big. In the three months to the end ofjune, facebook made a net profit of 3. 89 billion. Thats a jump of 71 on the same period last year, and better than wall street was expecting. Injune the number of active monthly users crossed the two billion mark. That means more than one in every four people
responsibility to monitor or basically moderate that content online. but james, the cable news environment, the internet environment was extreme well before 2016. let s go back to 2012. facebook played an oversized role in the reelection of barack obama in 2012. you didn t have the extremes there despite the fact you had cable news hosts back then saying that barack obama was a racist and wasn t even born in this country. so what happened in four years at facebook? i think a number of things happened. one is that news organizations actually started to publish on facebook, which in some ways legitimized facebook as a place for the majority of american voters to get their news. the news feed on facebook became one of the main information sources. so that legitimizizatiolegitimi
wall street journal, facebook is coming under fire for allowing researchers to play with people s emotions. the social network admits it manipulated the news feeds of more than a half million random users in 2012. facebook says it altered the number of positive and negative posts people saw in their feed and tracked any changes in tone in their posts. that s weird. i have to say really weird. out of all the privacy facebook thing, this is really kind of creepy. it s beyond creepy. i m part of an emotional test and i m going to alter your mood? that s just sgl yuck. exactly. if you re going to do a psychological experiment on somebody, you get a consent form. how can you just do this? this is what facebook does. they break boundaries and wait for people to erupt and then pare back and then do a little more. is it like liability if somebody seize all this negative stuff and gets depressed and
we pressed apple to tell us how many of those 4,000 to 5,000 requests it actually complied with. we didn t hear back on that. by comparison, facebook says it got 9,000 to 10,000 data requests from the government in the last half of 2012. facebook told us it complied with almost 80% of those requests. i asked chris segoya what happens if a company doesn t comply. ultimately, if the government has the right kind of court order, if the company pushes back too much, the company will get sued and it will get settled in court. reporter: we contacted the major u.s. intelligence and law enforcement agencies to comment on this, asked them to break down how many of the requests to apple came from each one of them. they either wouldn t comment or referred us to the justice department. justice also wouldn t break those numbers down, referring us to an earlier statement saying it used the right legal processes in these requests and that a very small number of accounts were targeted. jake? bri
lead analysts at morgan stanley, the main underwriter for the facebook ipo, received privileged information about the company, information that they didn t share with retail investors. finra, the financial industry regulation authority, regulatory authority, the u.s. senate banking committee, and the commonwealth of massachusetts have all announced probes into the matter, and that was quickly followed by a lawsuit filed by some investors against facebook and its ceo, mark zuckerberg, alleging that both withheld material information from investors during the ipo process. now, specifically, they re talking about forecasts that revenue would be lower in 2012. facebook tells cnn, by the way, that the lawsuit is without merit. ron gefner is a former s.e.c. investment attorney. henry blodgett is the ceo of business insider, a website. back in 2003, henry handled a civil charge with the s.e.c., banned from the securities industry. he s a good friend of our show. and i say this becau