A former Meta safety engineer told an Oakland jury that Mark Zuckerberg had the power to make child safety move fast inside the company. The states suing Meta now want the court to treat that as a product design problem, not a public relations problem.
Arturo Béjar spent two days on the stand in federal court in Oakland, on August 18 and 19, and his testimony gave the states their sharpest line so far: Meta knew young users were being pushed toward harmful experiences, and the company still built Facebook and Instagram around keeping people there longer.
That is the case.
As the Associated Press reported, Béjar told jurors Meta took a "don't ask, don't tell" approach to children under 13 on its platforms. He said the company focused employee reviews and pay for product teams on user numbers and time spent, while safety became an afterthought. You don't need much corporate translation to understand what that means. People build toward the targets they're paid to hit.
The lawsuit was filed in 2023 by a coalition of 29 states, with California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey leading this first federal trial in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The states accuse Meta of designing Facebook and Instagram to hook young users through features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, likes and notification systems, then hiding what it knew about the harm. They also allege Meta collected personal data from children under 13 without parental consent, in...
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