By Elliot Schrage, Vice President of Policy and Communications

Since its launch last June, Hard Questions has explored difficult topics that matter to Facebook’s global community — explicitly and openly confronting our handling of terrorism, hate speech and Russian ads on the platform.

Your response to Hard Questions inspired us to open a new channel that we hope will produce greater insights into the challenges facing Facebook and other technology companies.

This week we begin a series of interviews with the digital news site Axios. Our goal is to push ourselves toward even greater transparency and to participate in tough  questioning by an independent, highly credible news organization with public policy and technology expertise. Axios editors and reporters will fully control the questions and resulting coverage.

The kickoff is a wide-ranging interview with our Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg by Axios co-founder Mike Allen on October 12 at 9AM ET. You can watch it here and on Facebook Live.

In the coming months, Facebook executives will sit for interviews with Axios reporters and editors on some of the most crucial issues in social media. We’ll also be working with other news outlets and independent groups wanting access to our executives.

In all of this our goal is to open ourselves to hard questions, to be candid about our thinking and to invite constructive criticism and discussion. We hope to make better, more informed decisions with and for our communities worldwide and we hope you’ll participate.

Read more about our Hard Questions series.