Last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat through a congressional hearing over the company’s Libra cryptocurrency efforts, Instagram launched a standalone messaging app for users, and Twitter banned political advertising on its platform—and that was just a tiny portion of what made the news.

Because social media platforms are regularly in the spotlight, we’re launching a new series of monthly social media updates as part of eMarketer’s ongoing social media coverage. We’ll be bringing subscribers timely, monthly recaps of all the changes happening across the major social media platforms. Readers will find information on major developments and what they may mean for marketers.

In October, we saw:

Facebook released strong Q3 earnings, despite the news spotlight on the company over concerns regarding its stance on political ads and legislative scrutiny over Libra. Its ad revenues increased 29% year over year, and the number of monthly active users rose 8%.

Facebook tested its new “Facebook News” tab among certain US users, which will purportedly serve users higher-quality news than they would normally get from their regular News Feed.

Instagram launched its new standalone messaging app Threads, which the company is calling a “camera-first” app, which many people note is what Snapchat called itself ahead of its 2017 IPO.

Snapchat launched dynamic ads last month, rolling them out first for US users before going global in the next several months. The ad format has been popular on Facebook and is part of Snapchat’s attempt to appeal to the same performance-based advertisers.

Twitter announced that it would no longer accept political ads, with founder Jack Dorsey saying that current political ads present “new challenges to civic discourse.”

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