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 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 mothe ... Read full article.