Facebook shares rose as high as US$200 in extended trading. Earlier, they had slipped less than 1 per cent to US$188.25 in regular New York trading. The stock has gained 44 per cent this year.

Separately, Facebook also said Susan Desmond-Hellmann, the company’s lead independent director, is stepping down from the board. Desmond-Hellmann has been on the panel since 2013, and has been lead director since 2015. In a statement, she cited “increasing demands” from her role running the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, her family and her health as reasons for her resignation. The company said it will name Desmond-Hellmann’s replacement in the coming months.

On the earnings call, Facebook executives pointed to ads in Stories, where posts disappear after 24 hours, as one of the key growth areas for the company’s business, though Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg reiterated what she has said in past quarters: Stories ads still aren’t as expensive as some other kinds of Facebook ads. “Stories still don’t monetize at the same rate as News Feed right now,” Sandberg said.

Finance chief Dave Wehner said that in the short term, that probably won’t change. He said that Stories revenue will increase because of more ad impressions, not necessary higher prices.

The upbeat earnings are a positive bit of news from a company that has been under fire almost constantly for the past three years. Facebook’s most recent controversy centers on its handling of political advertisements ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election -- a small part of Facebook’s overall business. Facebook has said it won’t fact-check posts from politicians, including ads, because the company doesn’t want to be responsible for deciding what is true. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has defended the company’s position, citing principles of free speech and a desire to let people decide for themselves in a broad marketplace of ideas.

One consequence is that political candidates can lie in their ads, and pay Facebook to promote those ads more widely to its users. On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat of Virginia, joined the list of politicians decrying the company’s policy, joining presidential hopefuls Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, who have also called on the company to change its stance on fact-checking political ads.

On Wednesday, smaller social-media rival Twitter Inc. announced that it will ban political advertising from its platform starting next month. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that “political message reach should be earned, not bought.”

On a conference call with executives following the report, Zuckerberg addressed the company’s recent controversies, including the political ads policy. He pushed back on recent criticism about the company’s decisions, saying that Facebook is “at a crossroads.”

“I expect that this is going to be a very tough year. We try to do what we think is right but we’re not going to get everything right,” the CEO said. “I don’t think that anyone can say that we’re not doing what we believe, or that we haven’t thought hard enough about these issues.”

Facebook also shared estimates for 2020 spending, which was an area of focus for Wall Street analysts after two years of heavy investment in things like data centers, and efforts to better secure the platform from misinformation and abuse. Total expenses will rise to US$54 billion to US$59 billion next year, Facebook executives said Wednesday on the conference call, with capital expenditures projected to be US$17 billion to US$19 billion. Capital spending will come in at US$16 billion for all of 2019, the company said.

Operating margin, a measure of profitability, for the recent quarter was 41 per cent, up from 27 per cent in the second quarter and 22 per cent in the first. In both of those periods, Facebook’s operating expenses included billions set aside for an eventual US$5 billion fine as part of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission that was finalized in July.