Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., arrives for a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., Oct. 23, 2019.
Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The Facebook Papers, a series of articles published by a consortium of 17 U.S. news outlets beginning on Friday, shed new light on the company’s thinking behind its actions leading up to the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6 and its ability to fend of hate speech in languages outside of English.
Facebook shares were slightly negative in premarket trading Monday morning after the news outlets published their stories based on the leaked documents. The company is also scheduled to report quarterly earnings after markets close on Monday.
The documents were provided to the news outlets by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who took tens of thousands of pages of internal research with her before she left. She’s since provided those documents to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission, seeking whistleblower status.
“At the heart of these stories is a premise which is false,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement in response to the flood of reporting. “Yes, we’re a business and we make profit, but the idea that we do so at the expense of people’s safety or wellbeing misunderstands where our own commercial interests lie. The truth is we’ve invested $13 billion and have over 40,000 people to do one job: keep people safe on Facebook.”
Here are some of the major themes the Facebook Papers have explored so far:
January 6
The documents revealed frustration among Facebook’s ranks about the company’s ability to get the spread of potential inciting content under control.
“Haven’t we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence?” an employee wrote on an internal message board during the riot outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, according to the AP. “We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control.”
Facebook had put additional emergency measures in place ahead of the 2020 election to stem the spread of violent or dangerous content if needed. But as many as 22 of those measures were set aside after the election and before Jan. 6, internal documents reviewed by the AP showed.
A Facebook spokesperson told the outlet its use of those measures followed signals from its own platform and law enforcement.
Language barriers
Some of the reports showed how Facebook’s content moderation systems can fall flat when faced with languages besides English.
The Associated Press reported that Arabic poses a particularly difficult challenge for content moderators. Arabic-speaking users have learned to use symbols or extra spaces in words thought to set off flags in Facebook’s systems, like the names of militant groups.
While the methods are meant by some to avoid an overzealous content moderation system, the AP reported that certain measures have managed to avoid Facebook’s hate speech censors.
“We were incorrectly enforcing counterterrorism content in Arabic,” an internal Facebook document said, according to the AP. Meanwhile, it said, the system “limits users from participating in political speech, impeding their right to freedom of expression.”
Facebook told the AP it’s put more resources into recruiting local dialect and topic experts and has researched ways to improve its systems.
India
Other reports show that some Facebook employees were dismayed by the company’s handling of misinformation in India, believing leadership made decisions to avoid angering the Indian government.
Hate speech concerns in the region were amplified by similar language barrier issues as in the Middle East. According to the AP, Facebook added hate speech classifiers in Hindi and Bengali in 2018 and 2020, respectively.
One researcher who set up an account as a user in India in 2019 found that by following Facebook’s algorithm recommendations, they saw “more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” in the News Feed, according to The New York Times.
A Facebook spokesperson told the Times that hate speech against marginalized groups in India and elsewhere has been growing, and its “committed to updating our policies as hate speech evolves online.”
Retaining users
Other reports showed the existential issues facing the company if it failed to hold onto enough young users.
The platform is already experiencing a dip in engagement among teens, The Verge reported based on the internal documents.
“Most young adults perceive Facebook as a place for people in their 40s and 50s,” a March presentation from a team of data scientists said, according to The Verge. “Young adults perceive content as boring, misleading, and negative. They often have to get past irrelevant content to get to what matters.”
The documents showed that Facebook plans to test several ideas to increase teen engagement, like asking young users to update their connections and tweaking the News Feed algorithm to show users posts from outside their own network.
A Facebook spokesperson told The Verge that the platform is “no different” from any social media site that wants teens to use its services.
Shares of advertising technology company AppLovin and stock trading app Robinhood Markets each jumped about 7% in extended trading on Friday after S&P Global said the two will join the S&P 500 index.
The changes will go into effect before the beginning of trading on Sept. 22, S&P Global announced in a statement. AppLovin will replace MarketAxess Holdings, while Robinhood will take the place of Caesars Entertainment.
In March, short-seller Fuzzy Panda Research advised the committee for the large-cap U.S. index to keep AppLovin from becoming a constituent. AppLovin shares dropped 15% in December, when the committee picked Workday to join the S&P 500. Robinhood, for its part, saw shares slip 2% in June when it was excluded from a quarterly rebalancing of the index.
It’s normal for stocks to go up on news of their inclusion in a major index such as the S&P 500. Fund managers need to buy shares to reflect the updates.
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AppLovin and Robinhood both went public on Nasdaq in 2021.
Robinhood has been a favorite among retail investors who have bid up shares of meme stocks such as AMC Entertainment and GameStop.
AppLovin itself became a stock to watch, with shares gaining 278% in 2023 and over 700% in 2024. As of Friday’s close, the stock had gained only 51% so far in 2025. AppLovin’s software brings targeted ads to mobile apps and games.
Earlier this year, AppLovin offered to buy the U.S. TikTok business from China’s ByteDance. U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly extended the deadline for a sale, most recently in June.
At Robinhood’s annual general meeting in June, a shareholder asked Vlad Tenev, the company’s co-founder and CEO, if there were plans for getting into the S&P 500.
“It’s a difficult thing to plan for,” Tenev said. “I think it’s one of those things that hopefully happens.”
He said he believed the company was eligible.
Shares of MarketAxess, which specializes in fixed-income trading, have fallen 17% year to date, while shares of Caesars, which runs hotels and casinos, are down 21%.
U.S. Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter raised questions on Friday about the status of an artificial intelligence chatbot complaint against Snap that the agency referred to the Department of Justice earlier this year.
In January, the FTC announced that it would refer a non-public complaint regarding allegations that Snap’s My AI chatbot posed potential “risks and harms” to young users and said it would refer the suit to the DOJ “in the public interest.”
“We don’t know what has happened to that complaint,” Slaughter said on CNBC’s ‘The Exchange.” “The public does not know what has happened to that complaint, and that’s the kind of thing that I think people deserve answers on.”
Snap’s My AI chatbot, which debuted in 2023, is powered by large language models from OpenAI and Google and has drawn scrutiny for problematic responses.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Snap declined to comment.
Slaugther’s comments came a day after President Donald Trump held a White House dinner with several tech executives, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
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“The president is hosting Big Tech CEOs in the White House even as we’re reading about truly horrifying reports of chatbots engaging with small children,” she said.
Trump has been attempting to remove Slaughter from her FTC position, but earlier this week, U.S. appeals court allowed her to maintain her role.
On Thursday, the president asked the Supreme Court to allow him to fire her from the post.
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, who was selected by Trump to lead the commission, publicly opposed the complaint against Snap in January, prior to succeeding Lina Khan at the helm.
At the time, he said he would “release a more detailed statement about this affront to the Constitution and the rule of law” if the DOJ were to eventually file a complaint.
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai meets with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at Google for Startups in Warsaw, Poland, on February 13, 2025.
Klaudia Radecka | Nurphoto | Getty Images
From the courtroom to the boardroom, it was a big week for tech investors.
The resolution of Google’s antitrust case led to sharp rallies for Alphabet and Apple. Broadcom shareholders cheered a new $10 billion customer. And Tesla’s stock was buoyed by a freshly proposed pay package for CEO Elon Musk.
Add it up, and the U.S. tech industry’s eight trillion-dollar companies gained a combined $420 billion in market cap this week, lifting their total value to $21 trillion, despite a slide in Nvidia shares.
Those companies now account for roughly 36% of the S&P 500, a proportion so great by historical standards that Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, told CNBC by email, “there are no comparisons.”
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There was a certain irony to this week’s gains.
Alphabet’s 9% jump on Wednesday was directly tied to the U.S. government effort to diminish the search giant’s market control, which was part of a years-long campaign to break up Big Tech. Since 2020, Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta have all been hit with antitrust allegations by the Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission.
A year ago, Google lost to the DOJ, a result viewed by many as the most-significant antitrust decision for the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than two decades earlier. But in the remedies ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said Google won’t be forced to sell its Chrome browser despite its loss in court and instead handed down a more limited punishment, including a requirement to share search data with competitors.
The decision lifted Apple along with Alphabet, because the companies can stick with an arrangement that involves Google paying Applebillions of dollars per year to be the default search engine on iPhones. Alphabet rose more than 10% for the week and Apple added 3.2%, helping boost the Nasdaq 1.1%.
Analysts at Wedbush Securities wrote in a note after the decision that the ruling “removed a huge overhang” on Google’s stock and a “black cloud worry” that hung over Apple. Further, they said it clears the path for the companies to pursue a bigger artificial intelligence deal involving Gemini, Google’s AI models.
“This now lays the groundwork for Apple to continue its deal and ultimately likely double down on more AI related partnerships with Google Gemini down the road,” the analysts wrote.
Mehta explained that a major factor in his decision was the emergence of generative AI, which has become a much more competitive market than traditional search and has dramatically changed the market dynamics.
New players like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity have altered Google’s dominance, Mehta said, noting that generative AI technologies “may yet prove to be game changers.”
On Friday, Alphabet investors shrugged off a separate antitrust matter out of Europe. The company was hit with a 2.95-billion-euro ($3.45 billion) fine from European Union regulators for anti-competitive practices in its advertising technology business.
Broadcom pops
While OpenAI was an indirect catalyst for Google and Apple this week, it was more directly tied to the huge rally in Broadcom’s stock.
Following Broadcom’s better-than-expected earnings report on Thursday, CEO Hock Tan told analysts that his chipmaker had secured a $10 billion contract with a new customer, which would be the company’s fourth large AI client.
Several analysts said the new customer is OpenAI, and the Financial Times reported on a partnership between the two companies.
Broadcom is the newest entrant into the trillion-dollar club, thanks to the company’s custom chips for AI, already used by Google, Meta and TikTok parent ByteDance. With Its 13% jump this week, the stock is now up 120% in the past year, lifting Broadcom’s market cap to around $1.6 trillion.
“The company is firing on all cylinders with clear line of sight for growth supported by significant backlog,” analysts at Barclays wrote in a note, maintaining their buy recommendation and lifting their price target on the stock.
For the other giant AI chipmaker, the past week wasn’t so good.
Nvidia shares fell more than 4% in the holiday-shortened week, the worst performance among the megacaps. There was no apparent negative news for Nvidia, but the stock has now dropped for four consecutive weeks.
Still, Nvidia remains the largest company by market cap, valued at over $4 trillion, with its stock up 56% in the past 12 months.
Microsoft also fell this week and is on an extended slide, dropping for five straight weeks. Shares are still up 21% over the last 12 months.
On the flipside, Tesla has been the laggard in the group. Shares of the electric vehicle maker are down 13% this year due to a multi-quarter sales slump that reflects rising competition from lower-cost Chinese manufacturers and an aging lineup of EVs.
But Tesla shares climbed 5% this week, sparked mostly by gains on Friday after the company said it wants investors to approve a pay plan for Musk that could be worth up to almost $1 trillion.
The payouts, split into 12 tranches, would require Tesla to see significant value appreciation, starting with the first award that won’t kick in until the company almost doubles its market cap to $2 trillion.
Tesla Chairwoman Robyn Denholm told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin the plan was designed to keep Musk, the world’s richest person, “motivated and focused on delivering for the company.”