| Hey everyone, it's Kurt Wagner in Denver. Mark Zuckerberg used to love talking about elections on earnings calls. Not anymore. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Super Micro's auditor resigned, sending the server maker's shares crashing
• Microsoft disappointed investors by projecting slowing cloud revenue growth
• Apple unveiled its new MacBook Pro laptops with its latest powerful chips A few days before the 2020 US presidential election, Zuckerberg kicked off Meta Platforms Inc.'s earnings call by reassuring investors about the social media company's plans. "I'm worried that with our nation so divided, and election results potentially taking days or weeks to be finalized, there is a risk of civil unrest across the country," Meta's chief executive officer said at the time. "And given this, companies like ours need to go well beyond what we've done before." It was something investors were used to hearing. In fact, Zuckerberg spoke about elections and his company's responsibility to protect them on almost every earnings call between mid-2016 and early 2021. And then he stopped. On Wednesday, when Zuckerberg announced Meta's lackluster third-quarter results, he made no mention of democracy. Instead, he said he was focused on "making sure that we build some awesome things and make the most of the opportunities ahead." Meta's step back from the world of politics has been stark to those who follow the company. The social media giant used to tout its election protection efforts repeatedly ahead of major votes, and even took reporters to its Menlo Park, California, headquarters to show off an election "war room" set up to fight misinformation and other possible election threats in real time. In 2020, Zuckerberg said that he hoped Facebook would help register 4 million new voters. But the company has decided that politics is simply too messy to be good business. Is Zuckerberg hoping that by not speaking about Meta's responsibility, it will mean the company avoids blame when bad things inevitably happen on its platforms? Donald Trump and his new best friend Elon Musk have been setting the stage for months to challenge the election results should he lose next week. In the run-up to the 2020 US election, Meta did something that I thought was pretty clever: Instead of labeling just Trump's misleading posts about voting — opening the door for claims of bias and inevitable attacks by the then-sitting president — Meta instead labeled every post about voting, no matter who shared it. It was a way to label Trump without explicitly labeling Trump, and it simultaneously created a perception that Meta actually cared about distributing accurate election information. When the rhetoric continued to escalate despite the labels, Meta eventually said real-world violence was being planned on Facebook, and it decided to ban Trump entirely. I don't think it's dramatic or hyperbole to suggest that it might happen again. Fast forward to 2024 and those labels are gone. So are proactive touts and notifications pointing people to the company's voting information center. Meta, in fact, is downplaying political speech altogether. It stopped recommending posts about politics to users on Facebook, Instagram and Threads months ago. Suggesting political posts to users "comes along with too many problems to be worth any potential upside there might be on engagement or revenue," Instagram boss Adam Mosseri told me back in June. When asked whether Facebook would label posts about the election this year like they did in the past, a spokesperson said no. "We received user feedback that labels were overused," the spokesperson said in a statement. "In the event we do need to deploy them, our intention is to do so in a targeted and strategic way." Perhaps Meta will spring into action if Trump declares the election was stolen. Perhaps Trump will win and he won't need to revive his #stopthesteal campaign. But for Meta, after years of telling anyone who would listen that election integrity was a top priority, things have suddenly gotten very quiet.—Kurt Wagner Amazon is eager to upgrade its Alexa digital voice assistant to take on ChatGPT, OpenAI's generative artificial intelligence chatbot, but technical challenges have forced Amazon to repeatedly postpone the updated debut. For a company that a decade ago defined the novel category of listening hardware, it's position is objectively astounding. Meta reported third-quarter revenue that topped estimates, but investors still appear concerned about how much money the company is spending on AI. The world's AI frontrunners are increasingly turning to Taiwan to fabricate their chips, build their servers and cool their devices. The latest Call of Duty video game hit highs for players and Xbox Game Pass subscriptions. | 
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