Leaked slide refutes US Internet companies claims and shows data is collected “directly from” their servers + MORE

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week? Facebook Streamlines Ad Offering: Facebook says they plan to “streamline the number of ad units from 27 to […

Confusion surrounding the secret NSA surveillance program PRISM continues. Can the NSA really access Internet companies’ user data directly, like the initial reports about PRISM suggested?
On Friday, both Google’s Larry Page and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg strongly denied that, using almost identical wording
SEE ALSO: NSA Surveillance News: Everything You Need to Know

“Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the U…

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Facebook wants to simplify advertising and place the focus on the objective, not the method. The company announced Thursday that it is turning its advertising model around and going from 27 types of ad units to less than half of that, making the goal of the ad the first thing an advertiser sees, rather than a list of types of ads…

While you’ve been busy updating your company’s Facebook page, keeping your customers up to date through Twitter and posting the latest corporate video on YouTube, we’ve been reporting on the latest in social media news for businesses large and small.
In case you’ve missed any of it, here’s a recap of this week’s breaking stories…

The idea that US-based Internet companies are not directly supplying information to the US government and its intelligence agencies took a hit today with the release of a new slide detailing the PRISM program by Tom McCarthy on the Guardian: it states directly that direct access of servers exists.
Here’s the slide in question:

The slide itself makes it plain that PRISM is in fact distinct from collection of data from ‘upstream’ sources…