Meta on Tuesday announced it will eliminate its third-party fact-checking program to “restore free expression” and move to a “Community Notes” model, similar to the system that exists on Elon Musk‘s platform X.
The company said Community Notes will be written and rated by contributing users to provide more context to posts across its platforms, and the feature will roll out in the U.S. over the next couple of months. The announcement marks Meta’s latest attempt to smooth over relations with Republican President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office.
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes, and too much censorship,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday in a video announcement. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech, so we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our polices and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Zuckerberg said the third-party fact-checkers have been “too politically biased” and have “destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Meta said it will simplify its content policies by removing restrictions on subjects like immigration and gender and implement a new approach to policy enforcement that will focus on illegal and high-severity violations. The company is moving its trust and safety and content moderation teams from California, a historically Democratic state, to Texas, a historically Republican state.
“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said.
Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan addressed Meta’s announcement in an interview Tuesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” stating, “We should have an economy where the decisions of a single company or a single executive are not having extraordinary impact on speech online.”
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s head of global policy, appeared Tuesday on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” and said Meta thinks the Community Notes system on Musk’s platform X has been working “really well.” Musk, who has been a vocal advocate for Trump online and donated millions of dollars to his campaign, has been in close contact with the president-elect since the election.
Last week, Meta said that Kaplan would become the company’s top policy officer, succeeding Nick Clegg, who was a former British deputy prime minister and a leader of Britain’s centrist Liberal Democrats party.
Kaplan, who has held several policy-related positions at Meta since joining the company in 2011 when it was still named Facebook, is well known within the Republican Party. He was a White House deputy chief of staff under former President George W. Bush and also once worked as a law clerk for former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
In December, Kaplan revealed in a Facebook post that he joined Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during their recent visit at the New York Stock Exchange.
“We want to make it so that, bottom line, if you can say it on TV, you say it on the floor of Congress, you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship,” Kaplan said Tuesday.
Meta’s Oversight Board, which provides an independent check of the company’s content moderation, lauded the company’s changes on Tuesday.
“The Oversight Board welcomes the news that Meta will revise its approach to fact-checking, with the goal of finding a scalable solution to enhance trust, free speech and user voice on its platforms,” the board told CNBC in a statement, adding that “specifically in the United States, rightly or wrongly, Meta’s previous approach has been perceived as politically biased by many of its users.”
Prominent Republican lawmakers have previously criticized Meta and other technology companies for allegations regarding the censorship of conservative voices on their respective platforms. For instance, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, subpoenaed Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs in 2023 as part of a probe to “understand how and to what extent the Executive Branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”
Zuckerberg has had a rocky relationship with Trump over the years, with the president-elect more recently describing Facebook as an “enemy of the people” in a March interview with CNBC. Meta levied a two-year suspension on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2021 shortly after the company determined that the former president’s actions following the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C., could potentially incite more violence.
In 2023, Trump was able to regain access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts, but he also faced some restrictions and potential penalties if he were to violate the company’s community guidelines. Meta eventually removed Trump’s account-related restrictions in July during the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The company has taken additional steps to appease the incoming administration in recent months. On Monday, Meta announced Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a longtime friend of Trump, is joining its board.
Following Trump’s presidential victory in November, Zuckerberg joined a number of other big technology executives who visited the president-elect at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and in December, Meta confirmed a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund.
Nintendo Co. Switch 2 game consoles at a Bic Camera Inc. electronics store in Tokyo, Japan, on Thursday, June 5, 2025. Nintendo Co. fans from Tokyo to Manhattan stood in line for hours to be among the first to get a Switch 2, fueling one of the biggest global gadget debuts since the iPhone launches of yesteryear.
Kiyoshi Ota | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nintendo more than doubled revenue in its fiscal first quarter, as the company logged bumper sales of its Switch 2 console in the first month of release.
Sales of Nintendo’s Switch 2 now total 5.82 million units, the company said in an update on its investor relations website Friday.
Here’s how Nintendo did in the quarter ending on June 30 versus LSEG estimates:
Revenue: 572.3 billion Japanese yen ($3.8 billion), up 132% year-over-year and above the 474.84 billion yen expected.
Operating profit: 56.9billion yen, versus 53.46 billion yen expected.
Sales from Nintendo’s dedicated video game platform business grew 142.5% year-on-year to 555.5 billion yen, driven primarily by a higher price point for the Switch 2, compared with that of its predecessor, according to the company.
Sales within Nintendo’s intellectual property-related business — which includes movies and entertainment based on the company’s original games — meanwhile declined 4.4% due to a decrease in revenue from “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.”
Despite the bumper quarterly performance, Nintendo maintained its revenue and operating profit guidance for the fiscal year ending March 2026 unchanged at 1.9 trillion yen and 320 billion yen, respectively.
Nintendo shares have rallied roughly 40% so far this year on the back of excitement about the tech giant’s new Switch 2 hybrid console.
The device, which launched on June 5, sold more than 3.5 million units in its first four days and Nintendo expects it will hit 15 million unit sales in the current fiscal year.
Nintendo on Friday kept its annual sales forecast for the Switch 2 unchanged at 15 million units. Analysts, however, say this target is conservative, and that the company will likely exceed that number.
One factor that could dent Nintendo’s financial prospects is an expected hit from U.S. tariffs. However, analysts at Morningstar believe Nintendo will weather the storm by increasing its overall gaming audience.”
“Although Nintendo’s profitability is expected to decline in the short term due to higher tariff rates, the company will recoup the losses in the long term by selling more games to a larger user base,” said Kazunori Ito, director of equity research at Morningstar.
For its part, Nintendo said Friday that, “While there have been changes in the market environment since we announced our initial forecast for the fiscal year, such as the U.S. tariff measures, at this time there is no significant impact on our earnings forecast for this fiscal year.”
A Tesla vehicle passes the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. U.S. Courthouse as jury selection began in connection with allegations regarding the safety of Tesla’s autopilot system on July 14, 2025 in Miami, Florida.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
Tesla is facing a crucial verdict in a personal injury trial over a fatal Autopilot crash in 2019, the first time Elon Musk’s automaker has been in front of a jury on such a matter in federal court.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs on Thursday asked the jury to award damages of around $345 million. That includes $109 million in compensatory damages and $236 million in punitive damages. The trial in the Southern District of Florida started on July 14.
The suit centers around who shoulders the blame for a deadly crash that occurred in 2019 in Key Largo, Florida. A Tesla owner named George McGee was driving his Model S electric sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.
While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone that he was using and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way. He accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle.
Naibel Benavides, who was 22, died on the scene from injuries sustained in the crash. Her body was discovered about 75 feet away from the point of impact. Her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, survived but suffered multiple broken bones, a traumatic brain injury and psychological effects.
The plaintiffs have included Benavides’ surviving family members, and Angulo, who testified in the trial. Angulo is seeking compensation for his medical expenses and pain and suffering, while Benavides’ estate is suing for wrongful death, pain and suffering, and other punitive damages.
Lawyers representing the plaintiffs argued that Tesla’s partially automated driving systems, marketed as Autopilot at the time, had dangerous defects, which should have been known and fixed by the company, and that use of Autopilot should have been limited to roads where it could perform safely.
They also argued thatMusk and Tesla made false statements to customers, shareholders and the public, overstating the safety benefits and capabilities of Autopilot, which encouraged drivers to overly rely on it.
In opening arguments and throughout the trial, the plaintiffs’ attorneys and expert witnesses cited a litany of Musk’s past promises about Autopilot and Tesla’s autonomous vehicle technology. The lawyers said
Tesla attorneys countered in court that the company had communicated directly with customers about how to use Autopilot and other features, and that McGee’s driving was to blame for the collision. They said in closing arguments that Tesla works to develop technology to save drivers’ lives, and that a ruling against the EV maker would send the wrong message.
The Benavides family had previously sued McGee and settled with him. McGee was charged in October 2019 with careless driving and didn’t contest the charges.
While Tesla has typically been able to settle cases or move Autopilot-related suits into arbitration and out of the public eye, Judge Beth Bloom in the Miami court wrote, in an order in early July, that the case could move ahead to trial.
“A reasonable jury could find that Tesla acted in reckless disregard of human life for the sake of developing their product and maximizing profit,” she wrote in that order.
For closing arguments on Thursday, the Benavides family and Angulo were in the courtroom. They looked away from screens anytime a video or picture of the scene of the crash was displayed.
Tim Cook arrives for the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 8, 2025.
David Grogan | CNBC
Apple’s AI strategy and investment was on the mind of analysts on an earnings call after the company reported third-quarter earnings that showed overall revenue grew by 10% year over year.
While Apple was never going to announce major acquisitions or initiatives on an earnings call, CEO Tim Cook’s remarks on Thursday confirm that the company is going to invest more heavily in the technology.
Cook said Apple is going to “significantly” grow the company’s investments in AI. He added that Apple was always looking to buy companies of any size that could help it develop its AI offerings.
“We’re very open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap,” Cook said. “We are are not stuck on a certain size company, although the ones that we have acquired thus far this year are small in nature.”
Cook said that Apple had acquired “around” seven companies so far this year, although not all of them were focused on AI. While Cook has said in the past that Apple is always evaluating potential acquisitions of all sizes, its largest purchase of all time was Beats Electronics in 2014 for $3 billion.
He made the remarks Thursday as Apple has faced growing pressure from Wall Street to catch up to its Silicon Valley peers, all of whom have dedicated tens of billions of dollars toward the infrastructure necessary to power AI.
Apple has never been the biggest spender on capital expenditures among big tech companies. It only reported $3.46 billion in capital expenditures in the June quarter, up from $2.15 billion in the year ago period. Its expenses this past quarter are the highest they have been since the quarter ending December 2022. If Apple spent as much as it did this quarter for a full year, that would be about $14 billion annually.
That hardly compares to Google projecting $85 billion in capital expenditures for its fiscal 2025 last week, Meta’s estimate of as much as $72 billion in annual capital expenditure spending, and Microsoft’s $30 billion capital expenditures guide for the current quarter.
Spending more
“We are significantly growing our investment. We did during the June quarter. We will again in the September quarter,” Cook said.
He added that Apple was rearranging staff internally to focus more on AI.
“We are also reallocating a fair number of people to focus on on AI features within the company,” Cook said. “We have a great team, and we’re putting all of our energy behind it.”
To be clear, Google and Microsoft run cloud businesses that rent out AI hardware, which Apple doesn’t. And Apple finance chief Kevan Parekh said the company has a “hybrid” model to capital investments, in which it gains access to systems it needs through partners and records them as operating expenses.
Apple also said that some of its capex will pay for servers using its own chips, which it calls Private Cloud Compute — not merchant chips from companies such as Nvidia.
“I would say a significant portion of the driver of growth that you’re seeing now is really driven by some of our AI related investments,” Parekh said.
Cook also downplayed any potential that AI-powered devices that haven’t been invented yet might threaten Apple’s iPhone franchise. Apple’s former design guru Jony Ive teamed up with OpenAI in a $6.5 billion May deal, although they have yet to reveal what their product is, does or will cost.
“It’s difficult to see a world where iPhone’s not living in it,” Cook said, “That doesn’t mean that we are not thinking about other things as well, but I think that that the devices are likely to be complementary devices, not substitution.”
Cook also made it clear to investors and analysts on the call that Apple does have an AI strategy that it’s executing on.
“Our focus, from an AI point of view, is on putting AI features across the platform that are deeply personal, private and seamlessly integrated,” Cook said.
When asked if he thought that if large language models — the core AI technology made by companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI — might be commoditized, Cook declined to answer and said he was keeping some parts of the company’s strategy secret for now.
“The way that we look at AI is that it’s one of the most profound technologies of our lifetime” Cook said. “It will affect all devices in a significant way.”