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A Facebook whistleblower, two former U.S. defense secretaries, several past lawmakers and intelligence chiefs are forming a new group to address the harmful impacts social media can have on kids, communities and national security.

The Council for Responsible Social Media, publicly launched on Wednesday, is a project of the cross-partisan political reform nonprofit Issue One, which focuses on strengthening U.S. democracy and works with many former members of Congress on solutions.

Dick Gephardt, former House majority leader and Democratic representative from Missouri, had been involved with Issue One and helped create the council after trying to understand the roots of the country’s current polarization, he told CNBC in a phone interview Tuesday. Gephardt is one of the co-chairs of the council, along with Republican former Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey.

“People used to come to me and say, ‘What’s wrong with Congress? They can’t do anything, all they do is fight,'” Gephardt said. His response, he said, was that the division comes from the people.

“Congress has to be a reflection of the people and if the people are bitterly divided, then Congress will be bitterly divided,” he said.

Gephardt said he first considered whether traditional media may be contributing to the division, but figured there’s always been opinion and politicization on editorial pages. After watching the documentary “The Social Dilemma,” he began to believe that tech platforms could be a significant factor and began to speak with experts and read up on technology’s effect on democracy.

“My experience in Congress leads me always to believe that to solve any problem in a democracy, you’ve got to get diverse people together, to talk to one another, to listen to one another,” Gephardt said.

Some well-known names joining the council include former Secretaries of Defense Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta, former Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen and former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris.

Chris Krebs, Michael Rogers and Porter Goss, who previously led the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, respectively, are also members.

The council said it aims to drive bipartisan conversation around tech in Washington, D.C., and across the country, elevate nonpartisan voices like parents and pediatricians, and advance effective solutions to reform social media. While members have already met virtually to kick off their work, they will have their first in-person meeting Thursday in Washington.

“I think things like this group are very important for providing a unified front, to get common-sense change that can really make a difference,” Haugen, the former Facebook employee who leaked internal documents about the company’s policies and research to lawmakers, journalists and the Securities and Exchange Commission, told CNBC in a phone interview Tuesday.

Haugen said the issues stemming from social media are truly bipartisan in nature, which could be made more clear by avoiding framing them as issues of content moderation. Many conservatives are skeptical of content moderation because they believe platforms can use it to censor certain viewpoints, though mainstream platforms have repeatedly denied they do so.

Haugen said she sees content moderation as largely a “distraction from the real path forward, which is around product design, safety by design, transparency.”

It’s more important than ever to design for safety rather than rely on content moderation alone, Haugen said, as platforms move toward end-to-end encryption that prevents them from being able to monitor the substance of messages between users.

“The way you keep people safe in those environments is through design, and through each other,” Haugen said.

Gephardt said he sees the role of the council as a way to create informed solutions and keep the attention on these issues in Washington. He remembered some advice that a mentor gave him during his first year in Congress.

“You can never pass some meaningful legislation here with just support on the inside of Congress, you have to build support on the outside by the people for anything that you really want to pass,” Gephardt recalled former Rep. Richard Bolling, D-Mo., told him. “So I guess I see this group as being just a part, a little part, of that outside pressure that’s needed to try to drive something across the finish line.”

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EBay shares soar after Meta allows listings on Facebook Marketplace in U.S., Europe

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EBay shares soar after Meta allows listings on Facebook Marketplace in U.S., Europe

A sign is posted in front of the eBay headquarters in San Jose, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Shares of eBay soared 8% Wednesday as Meta said it will allow some listings to show up on Facebook Marketplace, its popular platform connecting consumers for local item pickups and more.

EBay stock reached its highest level since November 2021.

The rollout will begin with a test in Germany, France and the United States, where buyers will be able to view listings directly on Marketplace and complete the rest of their transactions on eBay, Meta said in a release.

The partnership could provide a boost to eBay’s marketplace business, which has struggled to compete with e-commerce rivals like Amazon, Walmart, Temu and even Facebook’s own marketplace platform that lets users buy and sell items.

EBay has recently embraced niche categories like collectibles and luxury goods to try and keep buyers and sellers returning to its site. CEO Jamie Iannone told CNBC in an October interview that shoppers were coming to the site, known for its used and refurbished goods, as they sought out discounts amid a rocky macroeconomic environment.

Meta’s move is an attempt to appease the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, after the regulator fined the company 797 million euros ($821 million) in November for tying its Marketplace product to the main Facebook app.

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At the time, the Commission said that Meta’s bundling of Marketplace with Facebook could mean competitors are effectively “foreclosed” given the distribution reach of the platform. Facebook counts more than 3 billion users globally.

The Commission also said that Meta imposes “unfair trading conditions” on other online classified ads service providers who advertise on its platforms, especially Facebook and Instagram. It added that these conditions allow Meta to use data generated from other advertisers to benefit Marketplace.

Meta appealed the ruling at the time, saying that it “ignores the realities of the thriving European market for online classified listing services.”

“While we disagree with and continue to appeal the European Commission’s decision on Facebook Marketplace, we are working quickly and constructively to build a solution which addresses the points raised,” the company said Wednesday.

EBay touted its integration with Facebook Marketplace as a way for the e-commerce site to “increase exposure to our sellers’ listings, on and off eBay, as part of our strategy to engage buyers and deepen customer loyalty.”

Facebook in 2023 announced a similar partnership with Amazon that lets users browse and purchase products without leaving the app.

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Additional reporting by CNBC’s Annie Palmer.

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Amazon workers in North Carolina to vote on unionization next month

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Amazon workers in North Carolina to vote on unionization next month

An Amazon employee works to fulfill same-day orders during Cyber Monday, one of the company’s busiest days, at an Amazon fulfillment center in Orlando, Florida, on Dec. 2, 2024.

Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo | Getty Images

Amazon warehouse workers at a site in North Carolina will vote next month on whether to join a union, setting the stage for the company’s latest labor battle.

Workers at the Garner, North Carolina, facility will cast their ballots from Feb. 10 to Feb. 15, according to a Tuesday post on X by Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity & Empowerment, the group seeking to organize staffers. Representatives from Amazon and the National Labor Relations Board didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Known as CAUSE, the grassroots group led by current and former employees has been working to organize Amazon employees at the warehouse, which is located in a suburb about 10 miles south of Raleigh, for the past three years.

If the election is successful, the warehouse, known as RDU1, would be only the second Amazon site in the U.S. to unionize. Workers at Amazon’s largest warehouse in New York City voted to join the Amazon Labor Union in 2022, but the group struggled to negotiate a contract with Amazon, and last June, the ALU voted to affiliate with the Teamsters.

A handful of union elections were held at Amazon warehouses in the U.S. in recent years but employees have either rejected unionization or the results continue to be disputed in lengthy court battles. Last November, a federal labor judge ordered a third rerun election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, after ruling the company improperly interfered in the vote.

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CAUSE filed for a union election last month, saying in a press release that 30% of workers at the North Carolina site signed union authorization cards, which is the necessary threshold to trigger an NLRB vote. Organizers are seeking to boost wages and improve working conditions.

The union filing comes after Amazon delivery and warehouse workers went on strike at nine facilities last month to push the company to come to the bargaining table, according to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents the employees. The action was intended to snarl Amazon’s operations during the busiest holiday shopping period of the year, referred to as peak season. An Amazon representative told Reuters the company expected to see a limited impact on deliveries from the strike.

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Apple’s inaccurate AI news alerts shows the tech has a growing misinformation problem

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Apple's inaccurate AI news alerts shows the tech has a growing misinformation problem

Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images

An artificial intelligence feature on iPhones is generating fake news alerts, stoking concerns about the technology’s ability to spread misinformation.

Last week, a feature recently launched by Apple that summarizes users’ notifications using AI, pushed out inaccurately summarized BBC News app notifications on the broadcaster’s story about the PDC World Darts Championship semi-final, falsely claiming British darts player Luke Littler had won the championship.

The incident happened a day before the actual tournament’s final, which Littler did go on to win.

Then, just hours after that incident occurred, a separate notification generated by Apple Intelligence, the tech giant’s AI system, falsely claimed that Tennis legend Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.

The BBC has been trying for about a month to get Apple to fix the problem. The British state broadcaster complained to Apple in December after its AI feature generated a false headline suggesting that Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of health insurance firm UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself — which never happened.

Apple was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC. On Monday, Apple told the BBC that it’s working on an update to resolve the problem by adding a clarification that shows when Apple Intelligence is responsible for the text displayed in the notifications. Currently, generated news notifications show up as coming directly from the source.

“Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback,” the company said in a statement shared with the BBC. Apple added that it’s encouraging users to report a concern if they view an “unexpected notification summary.”

The BBC isn’t the only news organization that has been affected by Apple Intelligence inaccurately summarizing news notifications. In November, the feature sent an AI-summarized notification wrongly claiming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested.

The mistake was flagged on the social media app Bluesky by Ken Schwencke, a senior editor at investigative journalism site ProPublica.

CNBC has reached out to the BBC and New York Times for comment on Apple’s proposed solution to its AI feature’s misinformation issue.

AI’s misinformation problem

Apple touts its AI-generated notification summaries as an effective way to group and rewrite previews of news app notifications into a single alert on a users’ lock screen.

It’s a feature Apple says is designed to help users scan their notifications for key details and cut down on the overwhelming barrage of updates many smartphone users are familiar with.

However, this has resulted in what AI experts refer to as “hallucinations” — responses generated by AI that contain false or misleading information.

“I suspect that Apple will not be alone in having challenges with AI-generated content. We’ve already seen numerous examples of AI services confidently telling mistruths, so-called ‘hallucinations’,” Ben Wood, chief analyst at tech-focused market research firm CCS Insights, told CNBC.

In Apple’s case, because the AI is trying to consolidate notifications and condense them to show only a basic summary of information, it’s mashed the words together in a way that’s inaccurately characterized the events — but confidently presenting them as facts.

“Apple had the added complexity of trying to compress content into very short summaries, which ended up delivering erroneous messages,” Wood added. “Apple will undoubtedly seek to address this as soon as possible, and I’m sure rivals will be watching closely to see how it responds.”

Generative AI works by trying to figure out the best possible answer to a question or prompt inserted by a user, relying on vast quantities of data which its underlying large language models are trained on.

Sometimes the AI might not know the answer. But because it’s been programmed to always present a response to user prompts, this can result in cases where the AI effectively lies.

It’s not clear exactly when Apple’s resolution to the bug in its notification summarization feature will be fixed. The iPhone maker said to expect one to arrive in “the coming weeks.”

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