Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, walked into the sunlight-lit hotel conference room in Brooklyn on Thursday to meet with a dozen youth leaders working in tech safety, policy, and innovation.
The young adults chatted away at black circular tables, many unaware of his presence until he plopped down at a table and started talking with them.
After making his way through various tables in the room, he took the stage to talk about the hopes and harms of this era of technological progress.
“Thank God you guys exist, thank God you guys are here,” he said. He spoke about tech platforms having become more powerful than governments; that these social media spaces were created based on community, yet said there has been “no responsibility to ensure the safety of those online communities.”
At one point, he said that there were people in power only incentivized by pure profit, rather than safety and well-being. “You have the knowledge and the skillset and the confidence and the bravery and the courage to be able to stand up to these things,” he said to the crowd.
The event yesterday was hosted by the Responsible Tech Youth Power Fund (RTYPF), a grant initiative to support youth organizations working to shape the future of technology. The Duke’s Foundation, Archewell, which he co-founded with his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, funded the second cohort of RTYPF grantees, alongside names like Pinterest and Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures.
TechCrunch received exclusive access to the event to chat with attendees, average age of around 22, about their work amidst the rapidly changing technological landscape.
The young people at the event were cautiously optimistic about the future of artificial intelligence, but worried about the impact social media was having on their livelihoods. Everything is moving so fast these days, they said, faster than the law can keep up.
“It’s not that the youth are anti-technology,” said Lydia Burns, 27, who leads youth and community partnerships at the nonprofit Seek Common Grounds. “It’s just that we feel we should have more input and seats at the table to talk about how these things impact our lives.”
Each turn of every conversation at the event led back to social media.
It’s consuming every part of a young person’s life, yet the clouds have the potential to become darker, the young people said at the event.
Adam Billen, 23, helps run the organization Encode, which advocates for safe and responsible AI. He’s worked on the Take It Down Act, seeking to tackle AI generated porn and other pieces of legislation, like California’s SB53 that wants to establish whistleblower protections for employees over AI-related issues. Billen, like the other young people at the event, is working fast to help the people in power understand new technology that is innovating even faster.
“As recently as two years ago, it was just not possible for someone without technical expertise to create realistic AI nudes of someone,” he told TechCrunch. “But today, with advances in generative AI, there are apps and websites publicly available for free that are being advertised to kids,” on social media platforms.
He’s heard of cases where young people simply take photos of their classmates, fully clothed, and then upload them to AI image platforms to get realistic nudes of their peers. Doing that is not nationally illegal yet, he said, and guardrails from Big Tech are loose. On these platforms, he said, it’s all too easy to see advertisements for tools to create deep fake porns, meaning it’s all too easy for children to find it too.
Sneha Dave, 26, the founder of Generation Patient, an organization that advocates for the support of young people with chronic conditions, is also worried about the sharp turn social media has taken. Influencers are doing paid advertisements for prescription medications, and teenagers are being fed pharmaceutical ads on social media, she said.
“We don’t know how the FDA works with these companies to try to flag to make sure there’s not misinformation being spread by influencers advertising these prescription medications,” Dave told TechCrunch, speaking about Big Tech platforms.
Social media in general has become a mental health crisis, the young people told us. Yoelle Gulko, 22, is working on a film to help people better understand the dangers of social media. She said walking through college campuses these days, she hears of numerous people simply deleting their social media accounts, feeling helpless in their relationship to the online world.
“Young people shouldn’t be left to fend for themselves,” Gulko said. “Young people should really be given the tools to succeed online, and that’s something a lot of us are doing.”
Leo Wu, 21, remembers the exact moment that led him to start his nonprofit, AI Consensus.
It was back in 2023 when hype around ChatGPT was becoming widespread. “There was all this press from universities and media outlets about how it was destroying education,” Wu told TechCrunch. “And we just had this feeling that this was not at all the way, the attitude to take.”
So he launched AI Consensus, which works with students, tech companies, and educational institutions to talk about the best ways students can use AI in school.
“Is it a teenager’s fault for being addicted to Instagram?” Wu told us, capturing what many young people felt when asked. “Or is it the fault of a company that is making this technology addictive?”
Wu wants to help students learn how to work with AI while still learning how to think for themselves.
Working to push regulation was the main way the attendees we spoke to were looking to advocate for themselves. Some were, however, building their own organizations, putting the youth perspective at the forefront.
“I see youth as the bridge between our current government and what the responsible tech future is,” said Jennifer Wang, the founder of Paragon, which connects students with governments looking for perspectives on tech policy issues.
Meanwhile, Generation Patient’s Dave is pushing for more collaboration between the FDA and FTC. She’s also working to help pass a bill through Congress to protect patients from deceptive drug ads online.
Encode’s Billen said he’s considering supporting bills in various states that will require disclosure boxes so people know they are talking to AI and not a human, as well as ones like the bill in California, looking to ban minors from using chatbots. He’s watching the Character.AI lawsuit closely, saying a verdict in that case would be a landmark in shaping future AI regulation.
His company, Encode, along with others in the tech policy space, filed an amicus brief in support of the mother suing Character.AI over the alleged role it played in her son’s death.
At one point during the event, the Duke sat next to Wu to talk about the opportunities and dangers of AI. They spoke about the need for more accountability and who had the power to push for change. That solution was clear.
“The people in this room,” Wu said.
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It turns out that decentralized social networks can go down, too.
On Thursday evening, the decentralized social network Bluesky experienced a significant outage, leaving users unable to load the app on both the web and mobile devices for roughly an hour. According to a message on Bluesky’s status page, the company was aware of the outage, which it attributed to “Major PDS Networking Problems.” (PDS means personal data servers.)
The first status message was posted at 6:55 PM ET, and a second one indicating that a fix was being applied was shared soon after at 7:38 PM ET.
The question many may be asking now is, how did this decentralized social network go down? Isn’t it … decentralized? Isn’t one of the perks of decentralization that there’s not a single point of failure?
Despite the platform’s decentralized nature, the majority of Bluesky users today interact with the service via Bluesky’s official app, powered by the AT Protocol. While in theory, anyone can run the various parts of the infrastructure that make up the protocol, including PDS, relays, and other components, it’s still early days for the social network, so few have done so.
Those who did, however, were not impacted by the outage.
In time, the idea is that many communities will be built on Bluesky, some with their own infrastructure, moderation services, and even client applications. (One example is the work that the Blacksky team is doing to create safer, more welcoming online spaces that take advantage of these decentralized tools.)
Eventually, the hope is that Bluesky will be one of many entities that run the infrastructure needed to support the growing number of applications built on the AT Protocol.
In the near term, however, an outage impacting Bluesky’s infrastructure will be felt more broadly.
The outage stirred up some of the rivalry between Bluesky and another decentralized social network, Mastodon, which runs on a different social networking protocol called ActivityPub. Mastodon users were quick to point to the outage in order to make jokes or jabs that focused on Bluesky’s approach to decentralization.
One Mastodon user, Luke Johnson, wrote, “see how the mighty Bluesky crumbles while the Raspberry Pi running Mastodon under my bed just keeps chugging along” — a reference to how Mastodon can run off even tiny machines users themselves configure.
Or, as another Mastodon user joked, “nice decentralization ya got there.”
In any event, Bluesky’s outage was resolved shortly after it began and the service is back up and running.
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OpenAI is reportedly building its own X-like social network. The project is still in the early stages, but there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that contains a social feed, The Verge reports. A social app would give OpenAI its own unique, real-time data that X and Meta already use to help train their AI models.
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Meta laid off employees on Thursday in its Reality Labs division, which encompasses various virtual and augmented reality projects. The cuts impact employees within Oculus Studios, which develops apps and games for Meta’s Quest headsets.
Meta did not specify how many people were impacted by the layoffs but said that the cuts impacted people working on Quest products, including Supernatural, a VR exercise app. Meta acquired Within, the company that makes Supernatural, in 2023.
“Some teams within Oculus Studios are undergoing shifts in structure and roles that have impacted team size,” Meta told TechCrunch in a statement. “These changes are meant to help Studios work more efficiently on future mixed reality experiences for our growing audience, while still delivering great content for people today.”
Reality Labs has been a massive cost for Meta, losing almost $5 billion in the last quarter of 2024 while generating about $1 billion in sales. Meta has reported billions of dollars in operating losses on Reality Labs each year since rebranding from Facebook and emphasizing its commitment to the “metaverse.”
These layoffs come in advance of Meta’s first-quarter earnings report next week, when the company may face scrutiny for the mounting costs of Reality Labs.
Meta told TechCrunch that laid off employees will have the opportunity to apply for other jobs at the company.
For Supernatural users, the layoffs mean that the app will produce fewer new workouts per week. However, each individual workout will be available at a wider variety of skill levels, instead of just one difficulty level per workout. The app also said in a Facebook post that the coaches who run the app’s workouts will not be impacted by the layoffs.
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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’ mental health despite downplaying the issue in public.
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; and 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, ‘I don’t want Mark Zuckerberg making decisions about my child’s online safety,’” Gardner said.
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Instagram Threads, Meta’s newest social network and X competitor, is officially relocating from the website Threads.net to Threads.com. The transition will coincide with a handful of quality-of-life improvements for the Threads web app, including features to more easily access custom feeds, saved posts, and likes, as well as other tools for creating new columns, copying posts for resharing, finding your favorite creators from X on Threads, and more.
Meta had initially launched its new social app in July 2023 on the URL Threads.net, as a Sequoia-backed Slack alternative startup had owned the Threads.com domain at the time. (That startup sold to Shopify last year.)
In September 2024, Meta acquired the Threads.com domain name and later began redirecting the URL Threads.com to Threads.net.
Starting today, Meta explains that users will no longer be redirected from the .com to the .net; it will be the other way around.
Going forward, if you type in Threads.com in your browser, you’ll go directly to your Threads home screen without being redirected. Meanwhile, those who type in Threads.net will be redirected to the URL Threads.com.
The change gives Meta a more prominent and better-remembered URL for its social app that now reaches over 320 million monthly active users, as of Meta’s last public earnings announcement in January. The rebrand of sorts may allow the app to better compete with its rival X, which also has a memorable (and simple!) domain name.
In addition to this change, Instagram head Adam Mosseri on Thursday announced a few other minor updates coming to the Threads web app, which is often used by creators.
He said users will now see their custom feeds appear in the web app in the same order as they appear on the mobile app. Plus, users will now be able to access their liked and saved posts via the main menu instead of having to create a pinned column to see them.
Another new addition allows users to copy a Threads post as an image instead of having to screenshot it. This will make it easier to share Threads posts in other apps, like Instagram, Meta thinks.
Threads users will also now be able to add a column by clicking a new column icon on the right side of the screen.
And they’ll be able to click a plus “+” button in the bottom-right to open a new window and compose a post.
There’s also a new feature that allows people to find and follow the same creators they previously followed on X. This feature was introduced earlier this month and works by having users download an archive of their X data, which is uploaded to Threads.
Those who previously had access to the feature were shown a pop-up saying they could now “Find popular creators from X.” The feature remains in testing, Meta says.
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