Technology

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

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 of 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 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’ mental health despite downplaying the issue in public.

MetaRoses — Parents of children lost to online harms left an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg outside Meta’s office in NYC, April 24, 2025. **Image Credits:**Rebecca Bellan

Thursday’s event organizers, which also included advocacy groups ParentsTogether Action and Design it For Us, delivered an open letter addressed to Zuckerberg with more than 10,000 signatures. The letter demands that Meta stop promoting dangerous content to kids (including sexualizing content, racism, hate speech, content promoting disordered eating, and more); prevent sexual predators and other bad actors from using Meta platforms to reach kids; provide transparent, fast resolutions to kids’ reports of problematic content or interactions.

Gardner placed the letter on a pile of rose bouquets that were placed outside Meta’s office on Wanamaker Place as protesters chanted, “Build a future where children are respected.”

Over the past year, Meta has implemented new safeguards for children and teens across Facebook and Instagram, including working with law enforcement and other tech platforms to prevent child exploitation. Meta recently introduced Teen Accounts to Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger, which limits who can contact a teen on the app and restricts the type of content the account holder can view. More recently, Instagram began using AI to find teens lying about their age to bypass safeguards.

“We know parents are concerned about their teens’ having unsafe or inappropriate experiences online,” Sophie Vogel, a Meta spokesperson, told TechCrunch. “It’s why we significantly changed the Instagram experience for teens with Teen Accounts, which were designed to address parents’ top concerns. Teen Accounts have built-in protections that limit who can contact teens and the content they see, and 94% of parents say these are helpful. We’ve also developed safety features to help prevent abuse, like warning teens when they’re chatting to someone in another country, and recently worked with Childhelp to launch a first-of-its kind online safety curriculum, helping middle schoolers recognize potential online harm and know where to go for help.”

Gardner says Meta’s actions don’t do enough to plug the gaps in safety.

For example, Gardner said, despite Meta’s stricter private messaging policies for teens, adults can still approach kids who are not in their network through post comments and ask them to approve their friend request.

“We’ve had researchers go on and sign on as a 12- or 13-year-old, and within a few minutes, they’re getting really extremist, violent, or sexualized content,” Gardner said. “So it’s clearly not working, and it’s not nearly enough.”

Gardner also noted that Meta’s recent changes to its fact-checking and content moderation policy in favor of community notes are a signal that the company is “letting go of more responsibility, not leaning in.”

Meta and its army of lobbyists also led the opposition to the Kids Online Safety Act, which failed to make it through Congress at the end of 2024. The bill had been widely expected to pass in the House of Representatives after sailing through a Senate vote, and would have imposed rules on social media to prevent the addiction and mental health harms the sites are widely agreed to cause.

“I think what [Mark Zuckerberg] needs to see, and what the point of today is, is to show that parents are really upset about this, and not just the ones who’ve lost their own kids, but other Americans who are waking up to this reality and thinking that, ‘I don’t want Mark Zuckerberg making decisions about my child’s online safety,’” Gardner said.

Technology

Pintarnya raises $16.7M to power jobs and financial services in Indonesia

Pintarnya, an Indonesian employment platform that goes beyond job matching by offering financial services along with full-time and side-gig opportunities, said it has raised a $16.7 million Series A round.

The funding was led by Square Peg with participation from existing investors Vertex Venture Southeast Asia & India and East Ventures.

Ghirish Pokardas, Nelly Nurmalasari, and Henry Hendrawan founded Pintarnya in 2022 to tackle two of the biggest challenges Indonesians face daily: earning enough and borrowing responsibly.

“Traditionally, mass workers in Indonesia find jobs offline through job fairs or word of mouth, with employers buried in paper applications and candidates rarely hearing back. For borrowing, their options are often limited to family/friend or predatory lenders with harsh collection practices,” Henry Hendrawan, co-founder of Pintarnya, told TechCrunch. “We digitize job matching with AI to make hiring faster and we provide workers with safer, healthier lending options — designed around what they can reasonably afford, rather than pushing them deeper into debt.”

Around 59% of Indonesia’s 150 million workforce is employed in the informal sector, highlighting the difficulties these workers encounter in accessing formal financial services because they lack verifiable income and official employment documentation.

Pintarnya tackles this challenge by partnering with asset-backed lenders to offer secured loans, using collateral such as gold, electronics, or vehicles, Hendrawan added.

Since its seed funding in 2022, the platform currently serves over 10 million job seeker users and 40,000 employers nationwide. Its revenue has increased almost fivefold year-over-year and expects to reach break-even by the end of the year, Hendrawn noted. Pintarnya primarily serves users aged 21 to 40, most of whom have a high school education or a diploma below university level. The startup aims to focus on this underserved segment, given the large population of blue-collar and informal workers in Indonesia.

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“Through the journey of building employment services, we discovered that our users needed more than just jobs — they needed access to financial services that traditional banks couldn’t provide,” said Hendrawan. “We digitize job matching with AI to make hiring faster and we provide workers with safer, healthier lending options — designed around what they can reasonably afford, rather than pushing them deeper into debt.”

Pintarnya Founders Press Kit — image credits: Pintarnya (Founders of Pintarnya Ghirish Pokardas, Nelly Nurmalasari, and Henry Hendrawan)

While Indonesia already has job platforms like JobStreet, Kalibrr, and Glints, these primarily cater to white-collar roles, which represent only a small portion of the workforce, according to Hendrawan. Pintarnya’s platform is designed specifically for blue-collar workers, offering tailored experiences such as quick-apply options for walk-in interviews, affordable e-learning on relevant skills, in-app opportunities for supplemental income, and seamless connections to financial services like loans.

The same trend is evident in Indonesia’s fintech sector, which similarly caters to white-collar or upper-middle-class consumers. Conventional credit scoring models for loans, which rely on steady monthly income and bank account activity, often leave blue-collar workers overlooked by existing fintech providers, Hendrawan explained.

When asked about which fintech services are most in demand, Hendrawan mentioned, “Given their employment status, lending is the most in-demand financial service for Pintarnya’s users today. We are planning to ‘graduate’ them to micro-savings and investments down the road through innovative products with our partners.”

The new funding will enable Pintarnya to strengthen its platform technology and broaden its financial service offerings through strategic partnerships. With most Indonesian workers employed in blue-collar and informal sectors, the co-founders see substantial growth opportunities in the local market. Leveraging their extensive experience in managing businesses across Southeast Asia, they are also open to exploring regional expansion when the timing is right.

“Our vision is for Pintarnya to be the everyday companion that empowers Indonesians to not only make ends meet today, but also plan, grow, and upgrade their lives tomorrow … In five years, we see Pintarnya as the go-to super app for Indonesia’s workers, not just for earning income, but as a trusted partner throughout their life journey,” Hendrawan said. “We want to be the first stop when someone is looking for work, a place that helps them upgrade their skills, and a reliable guide as they make financial decisions.”

Technology

OpenAI warns against SPVs and other ‘unauthorized’ investments

In a new blog post, OpenAI warns against “unauthorized opportunities to gain exposure to OpenAI through a variety of means,” including special purpose vehicles, known as SPVs.

“We urge you to be careful if you are contacted by a firm that purports to have access to OpenAI, including through the sale of an SPV interest with exposure to OpenAI equity,” the company writes. The blog post acknowledges that “not every offer of OpenAI equity […] is problematic” but says firms may be “attempting to circumvent our transfer restrictions.”

“If so, the sale will not be recognized and carry no economic value to you,” OpenAI says.

Investors have increasingly used SPVs (which pool money for one-off investments) as a way to buy into hot AI startups, prompting other VCs to criticize them as a vehicle for “tourist chumps.”

Business Insider reports that OpenAI isn’t the only major AI company looking to crack down on SPVs, with Anthropic reportedly telling Menlo Ventures it must use its own capital, not an SPV, to invest in an upcoming round.

Technology

Meta partners with Midjourney on AI image and video models

Meta is partnering with Midjourney to license the startup’s AI image and video generation technology, Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang announced Friday in a post on Threads. Wang says Meta’s research teams will collaborate with Midjourney to bring its technology into future AI models and products.

“To ensure Meta is able to deliver the best possible products for people it will require taking an all-of-the-above approach,” Wang said. “This means world-class talent, ambitious compute roadmap, and working with the best players across the industry.”

The Midjourney partnership could help Meta develop products that compete with industry-leading AI image and video models, such as OpenAI’s Sora, Black Forest Lab’s Flux, and Google’s Veo. Last year, Meta rolled out its own AI image generation tool, Imagine, into several of its products, including Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Meta also has an AI video generation tool, Movie Gen, that allows users to create videos from prompts.

The licensing agreement with Midjourney marks Meta’s latest deal to get ahead in the AI race. Earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on a hiring spree for AI talent, offering some researchers compensation packages worth upwards of $100 million. The social media giant also invested $14 billion in Scale AI, and acquired the AI voice startup Play AI.

Meta has held talks with several other leading AI labs about other acquisitions, and Zuckerberg even spoke with Elon Musk about joining his $97 billion takeover bid of OpenAI (Meta ultimately did not join the offer, and OpenAI denied Musk’s bid).

While the terms of Meta’s deal with Midjourney remain unknown, the startup’s CEO, David Holz, said in a post on X that his company remains independent with no investors; Midjourney is one of the few leading AI model developers that has never taken on outside funding. At one point, Meta talked with Midjourney about acquiring the startup, according to Upstarts Media.

Midjourney was founded in 2022 and quickly became a leader in the AI image generation space for its realistic, unique style. By 2023, the startup was reportedly on pace to generate $200 million in revenue. The startup sells subscriptions starting at $10 per month. It offers pricier tiers, which offer more AI image generations, that cost as much as $120 per month. In June, the startup released its first AI video model, V1.

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Meta’s partnership with Midjourney comes just two months after the startup was sued by Disney and Universal, alleging that it trained AI image models on copyrighted works. Several AI model developers — including Meta — face similar allegations from copyright holders, however, recent court cases pertaining to AI training data have sided with tech companies.

Got a sensitive tip or confidential documents? We’re reporting on the inner workings of the AI industry — from the companies shaping its future to the people impacted by their decisions. Reach out to Rebecca Bellan at [email protected] and Maxwell Zeff at [email protected]. For secure communication, you can contact us via Signal at @rebeccabellan.491 and @mzeff.88.

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