Anti-Surveillance Activist Is at Center of New Leak

Glenn Greenwald, a blogger who opposes government surveillance and has supported whistle-blowers, has published a top-secret order on the monitoring of phone logs.

Facebook Says It Will Simplify Options for Advertisers

Ad Formats at Facebook to Be Fewer

MENLO PARK, Calif. â€" When it comes to advertising, Facebook has decided it needs a new friend: simplicity.

A prospective advertiser is confronted with 27 types of ads from which to choose, like online coupons and a bewildering assortment of sponsored posts that can be sent to the news feeds of Facebook users.

On Thursday, the social network announced that it was going to simplify the process of buying ads significantly, starting with the first question posed to a buyer.

Instead of presenting a range of ad choices, Facebook will instead ask what the goal of the ad is â€" building a brand image, for instance, or persuading customers to come into a store. Then it will suggest ad formats that it believes will be effective.

“You are going to pick an objective,” said Fidji Simo, Facebook’s product manager for ads, at a news conference at the company’s headquarters. “Based on that, we will show you a range of formats.”

As part of the overhaul, Facebook plans to cut more than half the ad formats, eliminating offerings like ads that pose a question to users. And it will condense the various types of sponsored stories, ads that resemble a friend’s post that appear in a user’s main feed, into a single type of ad.

“It should be simpler,” Ms. Simo said.

Users could benefit, too, Facebook said, by seeing more uniformity in the types of ads in their feeds.

Although Facebook executives declined to discuss the expected financial impact from the changes, the goal was clearly to make it easier for advertisers, especially smaller and medium-size businesses that lack advertising agencies or other expert advisers, to buy ads that deliver results. The changes are scheduled to be introduced in the third and fourth quarters.

Debra Williamson, an analyst at eMarketer, a research firm, praised Facebook for trying to better align its products with the goals of advertisers. For a long time, she said, Facebook was promoting the idea that the social context of an ad â€" whether a user’s friend had praised a product, for example â€" was important to its value. But many advertisers found the idea, and the ad formats that accompanied it, to be difficult to navigate.

For the year, eMarketer expects Facebook to increase its ad revenue by 31 percent to $5.61 billion globally, compared with $4.28 billion in 2012. Facebook’s share of the United States online ad market is also growing, according to the research firm, which expects the social network to take in 6.5 percent of online ad dollars this year, up from 5.9 percent in 2012.

Brian Boland, Facebook’s director for product marketing, said the company was also trying to help advertisers, including smaller ones, better measure the effectiveness of their ad purchases.

Marshaling data on users to enable advertisers to customize ads better has become a major battleground for Facebook and its competitors as they vie for market share.

Twitter, another leading social network, announced on Thursday a partnership with WPP, one of the world’s biggest advertising companies, to share data and help WPP and its clients develop better marketing campaigns.

“As Twitter has grown, marketers are leveraging the platform for brand insights, relevant real-time messaging and customer research,” Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, said in a statement.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2013, on page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: Ad Formats At Facebook To Be Fewer .

Turks Angry Over Dearth of Protest Coverage by Established Media

The Turkish government blames Twitter. Many Turks point their fingers at a cowed news media.

Interactive Graphic Photographs

As protesters took to the streets of Istanbul and other cities, confronting security forces wielding water cannons, plastic bullets and tear gas, the leading Turkish television channels stuck with scheduled programming: a cooking show, a nature documentary, even a beauty pageant. To find out what was going on â€" and, the government maintains, to fuel the violence â€" Turks turned to Twitter and other social media.

On Wednesday came the backlash. The semiofficial Anatolia news agency said the police had detained 25 people on suspicion of using Twitter to incite crime. The arrests underline Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s antipathy for social media, which he denounced on Sunday as "the worst menace to society."

Mr. Erdogan singled out Twitter for what he called its role in escalating protests that began last week in Taksim Square in Istanbul and quickly spread to other cities, saying, “The best examples of lies can be found there.”

Critics of the government acknowledged that misinformation flourished on Twitter and other social media, with incorrect reports that the crackdown had resulted in large numbers of deaths, and digitally altered photos said to be of victims.

But they added that the rumors spread because the established news media were guilty of a lie of omission.

“Of course there is a dark side to Twitter,” said Asli Tunc, a media professor at Istanbul Bilgi University. “But if the mainstream media had done their job better, there would be less of this.”

As the protests escalated during the weekend, some demonstrators redirected their anger toward media organizations. On Sunday, hundreds of people gathered outside the offices of one broadcaster, HaberTurk TV; on Monday, a larger protest took place at another channel, NTV, with employees of the channel joining in.

On Tuesday, Cem Aydin, chief executive of Dogus Media Group, the parent company of NTV, apologized to viewers for the channel’s lack of coverage in the early days of the protest.

“Our audience feels like they were betrayed,” he said in a video of a speech to NTV employees, which was posted on the channel’s Web site. “Our professional responsibility is to report everything in the way it happens. The pursuit of balance within the imbalanced environment affected us, as it did the other media outlets.”

“We owe you and our audience an apology,” he added.

For a country with democratic elections, Turkey has a robust tradition of suppressing free speech, on the Internet and in the mainstream media. A World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group based in Paris, ranks Turkey a lowly 154th among 179 nations.

From 2007 to 2010, YouTube was repeatedly blocked after videos insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the first president of Turkey, were posted on the site. Dozens of journalists have been jailed in recent years, including many who have been accused of aiding terrorism by interviewing Kurdish separatists.

Still, there appear to be differences between the Turkish government’s response to the protests and the communications crackdowns employed by authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes during the Arab Spring, when several governments suspended Internet or mobile phone service in an effort to stop the spread of rebellion.

An executive of one leading Western Internet company, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that since the protests began in Turkey, there had been no sign of the government moving to cut off access to leading Web platforms like Twitter or Facebook, though some residents complained of sporadic outages of both.

Yet analysts say indirect censorship is widespread, with journalists operating in a climate of fear. Many of the leading Turkish newspapers and television broadcasters are owned by conglomerates with holdings in businesses like construction, where government contracts are an important source of revenue.

"If you are a company in construction that is trying to get government tenders, you are probably going to be careful about what you let your media company say," said Didem Akyel Collinsworth, a Turkey analyst at the International Crisis Group, an organization based in Brussels that works to defuse international disputes.

Andy Coulson Denies Hacking Charges

Former Cameron Aide Denies Hacking Charges

LONDON â€" Andy Coulson, a former senior aide to Prime Minister David Cameron and onetime senior editor in Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper outpost, pleaded not guilty on Thursday to charges relating to the phone hacking scandal that spread turmoil among journalists, politicians and police officers.

Mr. Coulson’s appearance at Southwark Crown Court in London came a day after Rebekah Brooks, 45, the former chief executive of Mr. Murdoch’s newspaper operations in Britain, appeared in the same court and denied five charges relating to the scandal.

The two former editors were among several ex-employees of Mr. Murdoch’s News International, a subsidiary of the giant News Corp., based in New York, who have been formally arraigned over the past two days pending trials expected to start later in the year. All have denied wrongdoing.

Mr. Coulson, 45, a former editor of the now-shuttered News of the World who went on to become Mr. Cameron’s communications director, faced one charge on Thursday of conspiring to intercept voice mails between 2000 and 2006, and two other charges relating to payments to public officials in return for information at various dates beteen 2002 and 2005.

On Wednesday Ms. Brooks, 45, entered a plea of not guilty to five charges, including conspiracies to hack phones, to commit misconduct in public office and to pervert the course of justice. Five other former employees of News International, the British subsidiary of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, as well as Ms. Brooks’s husband, Charlie, also appeared in court and entered pleas of not guilty to various charges.

The court appearances represented the latest chapter in an unfolding drama that led to the closing of Mr. Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid in July 2011 after accusations that its reporters had hacked into the voice mail of a kidnapped teenager, Milly Dowler, who was later found murdered.

The scandal mushroomed into bribery investigations involving police officers and public officials. A panel of inquiry set up by Parliament urged that British press regulations be enshrined into law to prevent a recurrence of the scandal.

Ms. Brooks, with her connections to the political elite, including Prime Minister Cameron, has been closely watched throughout the scandal. A former editor of both The News of the World and The Sun, Ms. Brooks has been accused of conspiracy to hack phones between 2000 and 2006 and conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office between 2004 and 2012. She is also accused of seeking to pervert the course of justice by conspiring with her personal assistant to spirit material away from police investigators in July 2011.

Ms. Brooks, Mr. Brooks and four other former News International employees were accused of seeking to pervert the course of justice. Separately, Clive Goodman, the former royal reporter for The News of the World, was accused of conspiracy to commit misconduct.

All of the defendants have been freed on bail pending trial.