Parents who lost children to online harms protest outside of Meta’s NYC office

Summary

Meta may have managed to kill a bipartisan bill to protect children online, but parents of children who have suffered from online harm are still putting pressure on social media companies to step up. On Thursday, 45 families who lost children to online harms — from sextortion to cyberbullying — held a vigil outside one of Meta’s Manhattan offices to honor the memory of their kids and demand action and accountability from the company. Many dressed in white, holding roses, signs that read “Meta profits, kids pay the price,” and framed photos of their dead children — a scene that starkly contrasted with the otherwise sunny spring day in New York City. While each family’s story is different, the thread that holds them together is that “they’ve all been ignored by the tech companies when they tried to reach out to them and alert them to what happened to their kid,” Sarah Gardner, CEO of child safety advocacy Heat Initiative, one of the organizers of the event, told TechCrunch. One mother, Perla Mendoza, said her son died of fentanyl poisoning after taking drugs that he purchased off a dealer on Snapchat. She is one of many parents with similar stories who have filed suit against Snap, alleging the company did little to prevent illegal drug sales on the platform before or after her son’s death. She found her son’s dealer posting images advertising hundreds of pills and reported it to Snap, but she says it took the company eight months to flag his account. “His drug dealer was selling on Facebook, too,” Mendoza told TechCrunch. “It’s all connected. He was doing the same thing on all those apps, [including] Instagram. He had multiple accounts.” The vigil follows recent testimony from whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, who reveals how Meta targeted 13- to 17-year-olds with ads when they were feeling down or depressed. It also comes four years after The Wall Street Journal published The Facebook Files, which show the company knew that Instagram was toxic for teen girls’ menta...