Connect with us

Published

on

In this article

A Senate panel plans to bring tech executives back to Capitol Hill following a revealing report from The Wall Street Journal about the impact of Facebook’s Instagram platform on teens’ mental health.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., ranking member of the Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection, announced the hearing in an interview on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.” Blackburn said the hearing would take place in a couple weeks and would include representatives from Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Snap and Google-owned YouTube.

A spokesperson for Blackburn said a hearing date and the specific attendees from the companies have not yet been confirmed.

The Journal’s report, which the outlet said was based on internal documents from Facebook, revealed that the company had been aware of significant negative impacts of its photo-sharing Instagram app on teenage girls. At a March hearing, CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in response to a question about children and mental health, that research he’s seen shows that “using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits.”

While the research cited in the Journal’s report did not show entirely negative effects, it seemed to cut against Facebook’s narrative about mental health. That angered several lawmakers across parties and chambers of Congress, some of whom called for Facebook to abandon plans to create a child-focused Instagram product.

“What we know is a lot of this anecdotal information that we had from parents, teachers, pediatricians about the harms of social media to children, that Facebook was aware of this,” Blackburn said. “They chose not to make this public.”

Blackburn said her staff met Friday with a whistleblower who has worked for Facebook, and who had access to documents on which the Journal reported.

Although both the House and the Senate have hauled tech CEOs to Congress several times over the past couple years, Blackburn said she expects this hearing to stand out because of its bipartisan nature. She said she is working with the subcommittee’s chair, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., on the effort and the two will look at rules around how social media is able to market to children, as well as statutes meant to protect them online, like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection (COPPA) Rule.

Representatives for Blumenthal did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We are determined to do something in a bipartisan way that is going to protect our children in the virtual space, that will allow them to be able to use the internet, do Zoom school if they need to, do research, but to be protected and to have their privacy protected when they are online,” Blackburn said.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on Blackburn’s remarks and pointed to an earlier blog post in response to the Journal’s reporting.

“We’re exploring ways to prompt [users] to look at different topics if they’re repeatedly looking at this type of content,” Karina Newton, Instagram’s head of public policy, wrote in the blog post. “We’re cautiously optimistic that these nudges will help point people towards content that inspires and uplifts them, and to a larger extent, will shift the part of Instagram’s culture that focuses on how people look.”

Spokespeople for Twitter and Snap declined to comment on the hearing. Representatives from the other companies Blackburn said would be invited did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube.

WATCH: Instagram’s Mosseri talks new features and antitrust concerns

Continue Reading

Technology

Baidu plans to expand its robotaxis to Europe with Lyft deal

Published

on

By

Baidu plans to expand its robotaxis to Europe with Lyft deal

Cheng Xin | Getty Images

Baidu will bring its driverless taxis to Europe next year via a partnership with U.S. ridehailing firm Lyft, as the Chinese tech giant looks to expand its autonomous vehicles globally.

The robotaxis will initially be deployed in the U.K. and Germany from 2026 with the aim to have “thousands” of vehicles across Europe in the “following years,” the two companies said.

Lyft has had very little presence in Europe until last week when it closed the acquisition of Germany-based ride hailing company FreeNow, which is available in over 150 cities across nine countries, including Ireland, the U.K., Germany and France.

Deployment of the autonomous cars is “pending regulatory approval,” Lyft and Baidu said in a Monday statement. It’s unclear if Lyft will offer Baidu’s robotaxis via the FreeNow app or another product.

The partnership marks a continued push from Baidu to expand its robotaxis to international markets.

Last month, Baidu partnered with Uber to deploy its autonomous cars on the ride-hailing giant’s platform outside the U.S. and mainland China, with a focus on the Middle East and Asia, which will launch later this year. The partnership also covers Europe, though a launch date for the region has not yet been disclosed.

In China, Baidu has been operating its own robotaxi service since 2021 in major cities like Beijing, allowing users to hail an Apollo Go car through the app. Meanwhile, for Lyft, the deal could boost the firm’s presence in the region as it looks to take on rivals like Uber and Bolt.

Autonomous vehicles have become a big focus for ride-hailing companies which have looked to partner with companies that are developing the technology for driverless cars.

In the U.K., a market that Lyft is targeting, Uber this year partnered with self-driving car technology firm Wayve to launch trials of fully autonomous rides starting in spring 2026.

Continue Reading

Technology

Tesla awards Musk $29 billion in shares with prior pay package in limbo

Published

on

By

Tesla awards Musk  billion in shares with prior pay package in limbo

Tesla approves 96 million-share award to CEO Elon Musk

Tesla CEO Elon Musk was awarded an interim pay package of 96 million shares of the company over the weekend. The shares would be worth about $29 billion.

Tesla stock climbed about 2% Monday.

The company said in a filing Sunday that the pay package would vest in two years as long as Musk continued as CEO or in another key executive position.

The new award would be forfeited if the legal battle over his 2018 compensation ends with Musk being able to exercise the larger pay package, which was valued at $56 billion.

In January, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick upheld a prior ruling in the case, Tornetta v. Musk, that the compensation plan was improperly granted. Tesla shareholders approved the pay package in June 2024.

The case is now before the Delaware Supreme Court.

Musk’s 2018 pay package included a set of performance targets for the company, which were all achieved.

The judge called it “the largest potential compensation opportunity ever observed in public markets” in her January decision and said it was 33 times higher than the nearest comparison, which was Musk’s prior compensation package.

Elon Musk: We'll have hundreds of thousands of full self-driving Teslas by the end of next year

Continue Reading

Technology

Legal AI startup Harvey hits $100 million in annual recurring revenue

Published

on

By

Legal AI startup Harvey hits 0 million in annual recurring revenue

Harvey co-founders Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra

Courtesy of Harvey

Artificial intelligence startup Harvey on Monday announced it has reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, just three years after its launch. 

Harvey runs an AI-powered legal platform for lawyers at law firms and large corporations. Its technology can help with legal research, drafting and diligence projects, and the company is also building industry-specific use cases. 

Winston Weinberg, co-founder and CEO of Harvey, said the startup’s ARR milestone has largely been driven by usage. Harvey has surpassed 500 customers, including CNBC’s parent company, Comcast, and its weekly average users have quadrupled over the past year, the startup said. 

“Most of our accounts grow pretty massively,” Weinberg told CNBC. “You’ll sell to a Comcast or to a law firm, and they’ll buy a couple hundred seats, and then they expand that usage pretty quickly.” 

Weinberg is a former lawyer, and he co-founded Harvey with his friend and roommate Gabe Pereyra, a former research scientist at Google DeepMind and Meta. The pair launched the company in 2022 after experimenting with OpenAI’s large language model GPT-3, which came out before its viral AI chatbot, ChatGPT. 

Read more CNBC tech news

The company’s name, Harvey, is partially inspired by one of the main characters in “Suits,” a legal drama TV series, Weinberg said.

Harvey has raised more than $800 million from investors, according to PitchBook, including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and the OpenAI Startup Fund. The company also earned a spot on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list. 

“With gen AI, and how fast everything’s moving, you just have to learn how to scale really, really fast,” Weinberg said. “I’d say, like every six months I go through a new scaling experience.”

In the months ahead, Weinberg said Harvey is focused on its global expansion and continuing to build out its team. The startup recently hired Siva Gurumurthy, the former director of engineering at Twitter, as its chief technology officer, and John Haddock, who spent a decade at Stripe, as its chief business officer. 

Weinberg said he has learned to appreciate the value of a strong team, especially during periods of rapid growth. 

“We’re starting to get to the point where we have really good leadership in place,” Weinberg said. “That just changes your ability to scale to such a massive degree.”

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC.

Continue Reading

Trending