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.”
The replica of the ARM is an electronic chip board during a collaborative ceremony launching a partnership between Malaysia and ARM Holdings in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on March 5, 2025.
Hari Anggara | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Arm Holdings shares dipped as much as 9% in after-hours trading on the company’s first-quarter earnings results Wednesday.
Here’s how the company did, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:
Earnings per share: 35 cents vs. 35 cents expected.
Revenue: $1.05 billion vs. $1.06 billion expected.
The company said it expects second-quarter revenue in the range of $1.01 billion to $1.11 billion, which was in line with $1.05 billion expected by analysts tracked by LSEG.
ARM is a chip technology firm that sells architecture for making chips that power billions of devices, including Apple and Qualcomm‘s chips.
During the quarter, Samsung launched the Galaxy Flip 7 based on the Exynos 2500, built on Arm’s compute subsystem platform.
CEO Rene Haas said in an interview with Reuters that the company was “consciously deciding to invest more heavily,” suggesting the company is considering designing its own processors.
Cristiano Amon, CEO & President, Qualcomm, on Centre Stage during day one of Web Summit 2024 at the MEO Arena in Lisbon, Portugal.
Shauna Clinton | Sportsfile | Getty Images
Qualcomm reported fiscal third-quarter earnings on Wednesday that beat Wall Street expectations and provided a stronger-than-expected guide for the current quarter. Qualcomm shares slid in extended trading.
Here’s how the chipmaker did for the quarter ending June 29 compared to LSEG consensus expectations:
Earnings per share: $2.77 adjusted versus $2.71 expected
Revenue: $10.37 billion versus $10.35 billion expected
In the current quarter, Qualcomm said it expected $2.85 per share at the midpoint of adjusted earnings on $10.7 billion in revenue at the midpoint. Analysts polled by LSEG were expecting $2.83 in adjusted earnings per share on $10.35 billion in revenue.
Net income during the quarter ending in June was $2.66 billion, or $2.43 per share, versus $2.13 billion, or $1.88 per share a year ago.
Qualcomm’s most important business is selling chips for smartphones under its Snapdragon brand, including the central processor and modem for high-end devices made by Samsung. It also provides modems to Apple. Its handset chip business reported $6.33 billion in revenue during the quarter, just shy of Wall Street expectations of $6.44 billion.
Qualcomm expects to lose Apple as a customer for its modem business in the coming years. But the company has been working to diversify its business by making chips for other devices, including Windows PCs and Meta‘s Quest virtual-reality headsets and Meta Ray-Bans smart glasses.
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Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon highlighted the company’s work with Meta in a short interview on Wednesday.
He said that making chips for devices like Meta’s Ray-Bans smart glasses was a good example of the chipmaker’s AI strategy, which was to embrace “personal AI,” or AI applications that run on devices, not the cloud.
Qualcomm reports its Meta revenues under its “Internet of Things” division, which had $1.68 billion in revenue during the quarter.
Amon referenced Mark Zuckerberg‘s AI vision statement Wednesday that focused on “personal superintelligence,” saying “the upside we had in the quarter within IoT is what we do in with smart glasses.”
CFO Akash Palkhiwala said that Meta had stronger-than-expected chip consumption during the quarter.
On Monday, Ray-Ban parent EssilorLuxottica said that sales of the smart glasses more than tripled on an annual basis.
“Mark put out a video today, just with a very clear vision of how they see personal AI and super intelligence evolving, and we are a key part of making that division happen,” Palkhiwala said.
Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are powered by a Qualcomm chip. Qualcomm, Samsung and Google are working on smart glasses, according to Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Amon also said Qualcomm would start to provide data about how much its chip business is growing without Apple — about 15% this year, he said.
Qualcomm is also looking to expand into data centers and sell versions of its chips that can be used for deploying artificial intelligence, Amon said on a call with an analysts. He said that Qualcomm was already in discussions with a major cloud company — called a hyperscaler — to supply AI chips. He said that Qualcomm could start to see revenues in its fiscal 2028.
“While we are in the early stages of this expansion, we are engaged with multiple potential customers,” Among said. “We are currently in advanced discussions with a leading hyperscaler.”
The company’s automotive business has been highlighted by Amon as one of the biggest growth opportunities for the company, but in the third quarter, it grew 21% to $984 million, below the 24% growth rate of the company’s IoT business.
Qualcomm’s other major division is QTL, which includes licensing fees for technology that Qualcomm developed and patented, including parts of the 5G standard. Overall, QTL revenues rose 11% to $1.32 billion.
Qualcomm said it spent just under $1 billion on cash dividends and $2.8 billion repurchasing 19 million shares of its stock during the quarter.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg presents Orion AR Glasses as he makes a keynote speech during the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Meta’s Reality Labs, the unit tasked with building the futuristic metaverse, continues bleeding money.
The social media company reported its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday and revealed that Reality Labs logged an operating loss of $4.53 billion while recording $370 million in sales during the period. Analysts were projecting that unit to post a second-quarter operating loss of $4.99 billion while generating $381 million in sales.
The Reality Labs division oversees the Quest line of virtual reality headsets in addition to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which are jointly developed with the French-Italian eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica. Meta wants Reality Labs to create cutting-edge products similar to the prototype Orion augmented reality glasses that could underpin a new, immersive computing platform.
But developing VR, AR and other new devices is an expensive endeavor, with the Reality Labs division logging nearly $70 billion in cumulative losses since late 2020. Meta in April said Reality Labs recorded an operating loss of $4.2 billion during the first quarter while bringing in $412 million in sales.
Although the Quest VR headsets haven’t become breakout hits, the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are showing signs of success.
EssilorLuxottica on Monday said Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses sales more than tripled year over year for the first half of 2025. The eyewear giant and Meta debuted in June the new Oakley Meta smart glasses, which is the latest product spawned from their partnership.
Meta said in April that an undisclosed number of Reality Labs employees who were part of its Oculus Studios VR and AR software unit were laid off.