Facebook's Ted Ullyot said in a post on the company's blog that the requests related to 18,000 to 19,000 user accounts and covered criminal and national security issues.
Mr Ullyot did not indicate to what extent the company had fulfilled the requests, but said Facebook had "aggressively" protected its users' data.
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"We frequently reject such requests outright, or require the government to substantially scale down its requests, or simply give the government much less data than it has requested," he said.
Mr Ullyot says the US government is allowing Facebook to disclose the national security-related requests it has received, but only in aggregate form and as a range.
“Since this story was first reported, we've been in discussions with U.S. national security authorities urging them to allow more transparency and flexibility around national security-related orders we are required to comply with,” he wrote in the post on the company's blog.
In a rare alliance, Facebook, Google and Microsoft Corp are pressuring the Obama administration to loosen their legal gag on government surveillance orders.
The companies are seeking to distance themselves from the internet dragnet code-named "PRISM" revealed in leaks last week.
Earlier this month, former computer technician Edward Snowden leaked details of a programme called Prism, run by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
The Guardian and Washington Post newspapers published documents alleging that the NSA said it could directly access the servers of firms including Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Google.
The firms denied the accusations, saying they gave no such access but did comply with lawful requests.
Mr Snowden, 29, fled the US to Hong Kong shortly before the newspapers published his revelations.
