Meta is monetizing kids as much as they are the rest of us. But this week the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has alleged that Meta has violated a 2020 order to protect kids on the site, as well as running afoul of the agency’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The FTC will not just be doling out another financial slap on the wrist, they’re moving to completely prohibit Meta from monetizing children at all. This is the TechCrunch Podcast where we talk about the top stories in tech with the people who cover them. This week, Darrell is joined by TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey to talk about if Meta’s cavalier approach to compliance will finally be coming to a close.

Articles from the episode:

• FTC moves to completely prohibit Meta from monetizing kids
• AI can’t replace human writers
• Hackers are increasingly using ChatGPT lures to spread malware on Facebook
• Stripe, a longtime partner of Lyft, signs a big deal with Uber
• Microsoft launches Pegasus program for startups, awarding up to $350,000 in credits

The TechCrunch Podcast posts every Friday. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts to be alerted when new episode drop. Check out the other TechCrunch podcasts: Equity, Found, and Chain Reaction.

Credits: The TechCrunch Podcast is produced by Maggie Stamets, hosted by Darrell Etherington, and edited by Kell. 

Snapchat Rolled out their generative AI chatbot, My AI to their 750 million monthly users so it feels like the right time to pause and ask whether we’re ready for the real thing – and ready or not, whether anybody wants one. This week on the TechCrunch Podcast, Darrell Etherington is talking to TechCrunch reporter, Amanda Silberling about making robot friends on the internet.

Articles from the episode:

• Snapchat’s AI chatbot is now free for all global us
• Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature, calling for its removal
• Missouri trans ‘snitch form’ down after people spammed it with the ‘Bee Movie’ script
• SpaceX’s successful failure is a wake-up call for Starship’s timeline
• Google’s Bard AI chatbot can now generate and debug code
• Apple wins antitrust court battle with Epic Games, appeals court rules

Credits: The TechCrunch Podcast is produced by Maggie Stamets, hosted by Darrell Etherington, and edited by Kell. 

Welcome back to the TechCrunch podcast. This week we're bringing you a special treat from our friends over at Equity. 

This week,  Alex recorded at Early Stage, TechCrunch's event for founders who are building startups from the ground up. Happily,  Darrell from the TechCrunch team was sitting next to us on the show floor so we tagged him in for some rocket knowledge.

Anyhoo, here's the run of show!

• All things Early Stage: Notes from the show floor, what we can infer about attendance and a vibe check.
• Elon's new, larger rocket went up (very good) and then went "boom" (not as good). Happily for the space race, the overall result of the launch was good. Rockets have a tendency to go boom when they are new, and it's a bit of the, well, testing process to have them do so. Sure, a non-boom result would have been better, but SpaceX wasn't planning on trying to reuse the parts anyway.
• Tesla's earnings came out and investors are not that pleased. While there was some good stuff in the numerical set, price cuts at the company and moderating cash flow indicate that profitability gains could be harder to reach in the future.
• And layoffs. Meta is cutting staff. Insider is cutting staff. BuzzFeed is cutting staff. It's a mess out there.

Credits: The TechCrunch Podcast is produced by Maggie Stamets, hosted by Darrell Etherington, and edited by Kell. 

Blue checkmarks on Twitter and Instagram are used by public figures and media outlets to say, “you can trust I am who I say I am and you can trust me.” But now both Twitter and Meta have changed the rules of how to get verified, and in the process have stripped some of the legitimacy of the all-powerful checkmark. This week on the TechCrunch Podcast, Darrell Etherington is talking to TechCrunch’s newest reporter, Morgan Sung about the price of being verified on social media.

Use Promo code TCPOD to ger 40% founder and investor passes to Early Stage on April 20 in Boston.

Articles from the episode:

Meta Verified is under fire in sex work circles for revealing users’ legal names

With Bedrock, Amazon enters the generative AI race

FTC orders supplement maker to pay $600K in first case involving hijacked Amazon reviews

Truecaller brings live caller ID to iPhone… but with a catch

Credits: The TechCrunch Podcast is produced by Maggie Stamets, hosted by Darrell Etherington, and edited by Kell. 

The internet is always changing but something about Generative AI feels different. With the advent of Open AI’s Chat GPT, the machines are evolving beyond remix and delivery machines to become the content creators themselves. In this week’s episode of the TechCrunch Podcast, Darrell Etherington talks with Techcrunch Senior reporter Devin Coldewey about how the AI hype is overshadowing some of its shadier possible cultural side effects. 

Use Promo code TCPOD to ger 40% founder and investor passes to Early Stage on April 20 in Boston.

Articles from the episode:

• The Great Pretender
• The takeaways from Stanford’s 386-page report on the state of AI
• A knife so sharp you don’t feel it cut
   

More from TechCrunch

• Thousands of Gen Z creators are using Fanfix to monetize content and interact with fans
• Hype grows for SpaceX’s Starship orbital flight test, but barriers remain
• Twitter’s new dog icon is sending dogecoin — sigh — to the moon
• Twitter’s new homepage logo is very doge-y
• Bob Lee, creator of Cash App and former CTO of Square, stabbed to death

Credits: The TechCrunch Podcast is produced by Maggie Stamets, hosted by Darrell Etherington, and edited by Kell. 

Welcome to another episode of The TechCrunch Podcast where we break down the biggest stories in tech news with the people who cover it. This week Darrell Etherington talks with Paul Sawers about the company that made a Woolly Mammoth meatball (and other lab-grown meat). And Amanda Silberling explains how AI images of Donald Trump getting arrested, the Balenciaga pope and a natural disaster that didn’t happen are fooling the internet. 

Use Promo code TCPOD to ger 40% founder and investor passes to Early Stage on April 20 in Boston.

Articles from the episode:

• From Balenciaga Pope to the Great Cascadia Earthquake, AI images are creating a new reality
• Cultured meat firm resurrects woolly mammoth in lab-grown meatball

More from TechCrunch

• Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried charged for allegedly bribing Chinese officials
• Binance and CEO Changpeng Zhao sued by CFTC over trading and derivative violations
• OpenAI connects ChatGPT to the internet
• That was fast! Microsoft slips ads into AI-powered Bing Chat
• Twitter announces new API with only free, basic and enterprise levels

Credits: The TechCrunch Podcast is produced by Maggie Stamets, hosted by Darrell Etherington, and edited by Kell. 

Welcome to another episode of The TechCrunch Podcast where we break down the biggest stories in tech news with the people who cover it. This week Darrell Etherington talks with Taylor Hatmaker about the TikTok CEO’s congressional testimony and Jaquie Melinek is here to catch us up on everything that’s been going on in Crypto from Do Kwon’s arrest to the SEC suing the Tron founder and many celebrities.

Use Promo code TCPOD to get 40% founder and investor passes to Early Stage on April 20 in Boston.

Articles from the episode:

• Terra creator Do Kwon reportedly arrested at Montenegro airport 
• SEC sues Tron founder and celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul and Soulja Boy, for crypto securities violations 
• Coinbase execs weigh in on the crypto’s future in US amid regulatory scrutiny
• TikTok CEO testifies before Congress
• TikTok CEO says it wasn’t ‘spying’ when ByteDance employees surveilled journalists

More from TechCrunch

• Amazon kills DPReview, the best camera review site on the web
• Google’s Bard lags behind GPT-4 and Claude in head-to-head comparison
• AWS takes a hit in latest round of Amazon layoffs
• Microsoft brings OpenAI’s DALL-E image creator to the new Bing

Credits: The TechCrunch Podcast is produced by Maggie Stamets, hosted by Darrell Etherington, and edited by Kell. 

Welcome to another episode of The TechCrunch Podcast where we break down the biggest stories in tech news with the people who cover it. This week Darrell Etherington talks with Dom-Madori Davis about how the SVB crash disproportionately affects Black founders. And Devin Coldewey fills us in on the improved capabilities of Open AI’s GPT-4.

Articles from the episode:

• ‘Trust is a hard thing to earn’: SVB’s closure could disproportionately affect Black founders
• 5 ways GPT-4 outsmarts ChatGPT

More from TechCrunch

• Microsoft lays off an ethical AI team as it doubles down on OpenAI
• Y Combinator cuts nearly 20% of staff, scales back growth stage investments
• Qualtrics accepts $12.5B all-cash acquisition offer to go private

Credits: The TechCrunch Podcast is produced by Maggie Stamets, hosted by Darrell Etherington, and edited by Kell. 

Welcome to another episode of The TechCrunch Podcast. To address the elephant in the newsroom, the SVB debacle happened mere hours after we recorded this episode. So, this week Romain Dillet is here to talk about another big story the proposed bipartisan bill that could lead to banning TikTok in the US. And Zack Whittaker comes on to warn us about the dangers of startups selling our data.

Articles from the episode:

• Proposed US bipartisan bill could lead to TikTok ban
• Today’s startups should terrify you

More from TechCrunch

• Russian game developer bans and doxes 6,700 cheaters
• Elon Musk apologizes after publicly mocking Twitter employee with disability
• Microsoft brings an AI-powered Copilot to its business app suite

Credits: The TechCrunch Podcast is produced by Maggie Stamets, hosted by Darrell Etherington, and edited by Kell. 

It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for—the winner is announced! In this episode, we get to know the winner of the 2022 Startup Battlefield competition. We’ll hear what’s next for their company and get insight from TechCrunch staff, VCs, and audience members on why they were the right choice.

Be sure to check out all of the other podcasts in the TechCrunch Podcast Network: Found, Equity, The TechCrunch Podcast, Chain Reaction and The TechCrunch Live Podcast.

Credits: The TechCrunch Podcast is produced by Maggie Stamets, hosted by Darrell Etherington, and edited by Kell.