Earlier in 2019, the company offered data on publicly shared links by at least 100 users and the number of times those links were shared and reported to 60 academic researchers across 30 universities.

Facebook said http://bit.ly/37rXrgO the new expanded data set includes more than 38 million links with information on users' reactions including views, clicks, shares and likes.

The company said monthly users of its core social network climbed 8% to 2.5 billion in January.

(Reporting by Amal S in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)