People using their mobile phones outside the offices of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, in King’s Cross, London.
Joshua Bratt | Pa Images | Getty Images
Lauren Wagner knows a lot about disinformation. Heading into the 2020 U.S. presidential election, she worked at Facebook, focusing on information integrity and overseeing products designed to make sure content was moderated and fact-checked.
She can’t believe what’s she’s seeing now. Since war erupted last month between Israel and Hamas, the constant deluge of misinformation and violent content spreading across the internet is hard for her to comprehend. Wagner left Facebook parent Meta last year, and her work in trust and safety feels like it was from a prior era.
“When you’re in a situation where there’s such a large volume of visual content, how do you even start managing that when it’s like long video clips and there’s multiple points of view?” Wagner said. “This idea of live-streaming terrorism, essentially at such a deep and in-depth scale, I don’t know how you manage that.”
The problem is even more pronounced because Meta, Google parent Alphabet, and X, formerly Twitter, have all eliminated jobs tied to content moderation and trust and safety as part of broader cost-cutting measures that began late last year and continued through 2023. Now, as people post and share out-of-context videos of previous wars, fabricated audio in news clips, and graphic videos of terrorist acts, the world’s most trafficked websites are struggling to keep up, experts have noted.
As the founder of a new venture capital firm, Radium Ventures, Wagner is in the midst of raising her first fund dedicated solely to startup founders working on trust and safety technologies. She said many more platforms that think they are “fairly innocuous” are seeing the need to act.
“Hopefully this is shining a light on the fact that if you house user-generated content, there’s an opportunity for misinformation, for charged information or potentially damaging information to spread,” Wagner said.
In addition to the traditional social networks, the highly polarized nature of the Israel-Hamas war affects internet platforms that weren’t typically known for hosting political discussions but now have to take precautionary measures. Popular online messaging and discussion channels such as Discord and Telegram could be exploited by terrorist groups and other bad actors who are increasingly using multiple communication services to create and conduct their propaganda campaigns.
A Discord spokesperson declined to comment. Telegram didn’t respond to a request for comment.
A demonstrator places flowers on white-shrouded body bags representing victims in the Israel-Hamas conflict, in front of the White House in Washington, DC, on November 15, 2023.
Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images
On kids gaming site Roblox, thousands of users recently attended pro-Palestinian protests held within the virtual world. That has required the company to closely monitor for posts that violate its community standards, a Roblox spokesperson told CNBC in a statement.
Roblox has thousands of moderators and “automated detection tools in place to monitor,” the spokesperson said, adding that the site “allows for expressions of solidarity,” but does “not allow for content that endorses or condones violence, promotes terrorism or hatred against individuals or groups, or calls for supporting a specific political party.”
When it comes to looking for talent in the trust and safety space, there’s no shortage. Many of Wagner’s former colleagues at Meta lost their jobs and remain dedicated to the cause.
One of her first investments was in a startup called Cove, which was founded by former Meta trust and safety staffers. Cove is among a handful of emerging companies developing technology that they can sell to organizations, following an established enterprise software model. Other Meta veterans have recently started Cinder and Sero AI to go after the same general market.
“It adds some more coherence to the information ecosystem,” Wagner, who is also a senior advisor at the Responsible Innovation Labs nonprofit, said regarding the new crop of trust and safety tools. “They provide some level of standardized processes across companies where they can access tools and guidelines to be able to manage user-generated content effectively.”
‘Brilliant people out there’
It’s not just ex-Meta staffers who recognize the opportunity.
The founding team of startup TrustLab came from companies including Google, Reddit and TikTok parent ByteDance. And the founders of Intrinsic previously worked on trust and safety-related issues at Apple and Discord.
For the TrustCon conference in July, tech policy wonks and other industry experts headed to San Francisco to discuss the latest hot topics in online trust and safety, including their concerns about the potential societal effects of layoffs across the industry.
Several startups showcased their products in the exhibition hall, promoting their services, talking to potential clients and recruiting talent. ActiveFence, which describes itself as a “leader in providing Trust & Safety solutions to protect online platforms and their users from malicious behavior and content,” had a booth at the conference. So did Checkstep, a content moderation platform.
Cove also had an exhibit at the event.
“I think the cost-cutting has definitely obviously affected the labor markets and the hiring market,” said Cove CEO Michael Dworsky, who co-founded the company in 2021 after more than three years at Facebook. “There are a bunch of brilliant people out there that we can now hire.”
Cove has developed software to help manage a company’s content policy and review process. The management platform works alongside various content moderation systems, or classifiers, to detect issues such as harassment, so businesses can protect their users without needing expensive engineers to develop the code. The company, which counts anonymous social media apps YikYak and Sidechat as customers, says on its website that Cove is “the solution we wish we had at Meta.”
“When Facebook started really investing in trust and safety, it’s not like there were tools on the market that they could have bought,” said Cove technology chief Mason Silber, who previously spent seven years at Facebook. “They didn’t want to build, they didn’t want to become the experts. They did it more out of necessity than desire, and they built some of the most robust, trusted safety solutions in the world.”
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment for this story.
Wagner, who left Meta in mid-2022 after about two and a half years at the company, said that earlier content moderation was more manageable than it is today, particularly with the current Middle East crisis. In the past, for instance, a trust and safety team member could analyze a picture and determine whether it contained false information through a fairly routine scan, she said.
But the quantity and speed of photos and videos being uploaded and the ability of people to manipulate details, especially as generative AI tools become more mainstream, has created a whole new hassle.
Social media sites are now dealing with a swarm of content related to two simultaneous wars, one in the Middle East and another between Russia and Ukraine. On top of that, they have to get ready for the 2024 presidential election in less than a year. Former President Donald Trump, who is under criminal indictment in Georgia for alleged interference in the 2020 election, is the front-runner to become the Republican nominee.
Manu Aggarwal, a partner at research firm Everest Group, said trust and safety is among the fastest-growing segments of a part of the market called business process services, which includes the outsourcing of various IT-related tasks and call centers.
By 2024, Everest Group projects the overall business process services market to be about $300 billion, with trust and safety representing about $11 billion of that figure. Companies such as Accenture and Genpact, which offer outsourced trust and safety services and contract workers, currently capture the bulk of spending, primarily because Big Tech companies have been “building their own” tools, Aggarwal said.
As startups focus on selling packaged and easy-to-use technology to a wider swath of clients, Everest Group practice director Abhijnan Dasgupta estimates that spending on trust and safety tools could be between $750 million and $1 billion by the end of 2024, up from $500 million in 2023. This figure is partly dependent on whether companies adopt more AI services, thus requiring them to potentially abide by emerging AI regulations, he added.
Tech investors are circling the opportunity. Venture capital firm Accel is the lead investor in Cinder, a two-year-old startup whose founders helped build much of Meta’s internal trust and safety systems and also worked on counterterrorism efforts.
“What better team to solve this challenge than the one that played a major role in defining Facebook’s Trust and Safety operations?” Accel’s Sara Ittelson said in a press release announcing the financing in December.
Ittelson told CNBC that she expects the trust and safety technology market to grow as more platforms see the need for greater protection and as the social media market continues to fragment.
The European Commission is now requiring large online platforms with big audiences in the EU to document and detail how they moderate and remove illegal and violent content on their services or face fines of up to 6% of their annual revenue.
Cinder and Cove are promoting their technologies as ways that online businesses can streamline and document their content moderation procedures to comply with the EU’s new regulations, called the Digital Services Act.
‘Frankenstein’s monster’
In the absence of specialized tech tools, Cove’s Dworsky said, many companies have tried to customize Zendesk, which sells customer support software, and Google Sheets to capture their trust and safety policies. That can result in a “very manual, unscalable approach,” he said, describing the process for some companies as “rebuilding and building a Frankenstein’s monster.”
Still, industry experts know that even the most effective trust and safety technologies aren’t a panacea for a problem as big and seemingly uncontrollable as the spread of violent content and disinformation. According to a survey published last week by the Anti-Defamation League, 70% of respondents said that on social media, they’d been exposed to at least one of several types of misinformation or hate related to the Israel-Hamas conflict.
As the problem expands, companies are dealing with the constant struggle over determining what constitutes free speech and what crosses the line into unlawful, or at least unacceptable, content.
Alex Goldenberg, the lead intelligence analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute, said that in addition to doing their best to maintain integrity on their sites, companies should be honest with their users about their content moderation efforts.
“There’s a balance that is tough to strike, but it is strikable,” he said. “One thing I would recommend is transparency at a time where third-party access and understanding to what is going on at scale on social platforms is what is needed.”
Noam Bardin, the former CEO of navigation firm Waze, now owned by Google, founded the social news-sharing and real-time messaging service Post last year. Bardin, who’s from Israel, said he’s been frustrated with the spread of misinformation and disinformation since the war began in October.
“The whole perception of what’s going on is fashioned and managed through social media, and this means there’s a tremendous influx of propaganda, disinformation, AI-generated content, bringing content from other conflicts into this conflict,” Bardin said.
Bardin said that Meta and X have struggled to manage and remove questionable posts, a challenge that’s become even greater with the influx of videos.
At Post, which is most similar to Twitter, Bardin said he’s been incorporating “all these moderation tools, automated tools and processes” since his company’s inception. He uses services from ActiveFence and OpenWeb, which are both based in Israel.
“Basically, anytime you comment or you post on our platform, it goes through it,” Bardin said regarding the trust and safety software. “It looks at it from an AI perspective to understand what it is and to rank it in terms of harm, pornography, violence, etc.”
Post is an example of the kinds of companies that trust and safety startups are focused on. Active online communities with live-chatting services have also emerged on video game sites, online marketplaces, dating apps and music streaming sites, opening them up to potentially harmful content from users.
Brian Fishman, co-founder of Cinder, said “militant organizations” rely on a network of services to spread propaganda, including platforms like Telegram, and sites such as Rumble and Vimeo, which have less advanced technology than Facebook.
Representatives from Rumble and Vimeo didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Fishman said customers are starting to see trust and safety tools as almost an extension of their cybersecurity budgets. In both cases, companies have to spend money to prevent possible disasters.
“Some of it is you’re paying for insurance, which means that you’re not getting full return on that investment every day,” Fishman said. “You’re investing a little bit more during black times, so that you got capability when you really, really need it, and this is one of those moments where companies really need it.”
Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.
Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images
Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.
Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.
Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.
Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.
“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”
Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.
Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.
“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.
‘AI’s moment to shine’
Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nikealready raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.
Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.
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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.
Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”
Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.
‘Not a silver bullet’
While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.
“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”
AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.
“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty. But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.
The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.
“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.
“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”
A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.
On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.
“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”
Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.
A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.
The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”
If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.
Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.
The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”
Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”
While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.
Teslais promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.
Shares of Intuit popped about 9% on Friday, a day after the company reported quarterly results that beat analysts’ estimates and issued rosy guidance for the full year.
Intuit, which is best known for its TurboTax and QuickBooks software, said revenue in the fiscal third quarter increased 15% to $7.8 billion. Net income rose 18% to $2.82 billion, or $10.02 per share, from $2.39 billion, or $8.42 per share, a year earlier.
“This is the fastest organic growth that we have had in over a decade,” Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi told CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime” on Thursday. “It’s really incredible growth across the platform.”
For its full fiscal year, Intuit said it expects to report revenue of $18.72 billion to $18.76 billion, up from the range of $18.16 billion to $18.35 billion it shared last quarter. Analysts were expecting $18.35 billion, according to LSEG.
“We’re redefining what’s possible with [artificial intelligence] by becoming a one-stop shop of AI-agents and AI-enabled human experts to fuel the success of consumers and small and mid-market businesses,” Goodarzi said in a release Thursday.
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Goldman Sachs analysts reiterated their buy rating on the stock and raised their price target to $860 from $750 on Thursday. The analysts said Intuit’s execution across its core growth pillars is “reinforcing confidence” in its growth profile over the long term.
The company’s AI roadmap, which includes the introduction of AI agents, will add additional upside, the analysts added.
“In our view, Intuit stands out as a rare asset straddling both consumer and business ecosystems, all while supplemented by AI-prioritization,” the Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a note.
Analysts at Deutsche Bank also reiterated their buy rating on the stock and raised their price target to $815 from $750.
They said the company’s results were “reassuring” after a rocky two years and that they feel more confident about its ability to grow the consumer business.
“Longer term, we continue to believe Intuit presents a unique investment opportunity and we see its platform approach powering accelerated innovation with leverage, thus enabling sustained mid-teens or better EPS growth,” the analysts wrote in a Friday note.