Washington CNN —
Meta’s top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, ignoredwarnings for years about harms to teens on its platforms such as Instagram, a company whistleblower told a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday.
Meta instead fosters a culture of “see no evil, hear no evil” that overlooks evidence of harm internally while publicly presenting carefully crafted metrics to downplay the issue, said Arturo Bejar, an ex-Facebook engineering director and consultant.
Bejar is the latest former insider to level public allegations that the tech giant knowingly turns a blind eye to problems that its policies and technology cannot cheaply or easily address.
Bejar’s testimony before members of the Senate Judiciary Committee comes after what he described as fruitless appeals to Zuckerberg and his lieutenants in the fall of 2021 based on research his team had conducted on the experiences of teens and other users of Meta’s platforms.
Tuesday’s hearing follows a public report by The Wall Street Journal last week that laid out many of Bejar’s claims, including that he first became motivated to study the issue because of unwanted sexual advances his own 14-year-old daughter received from strangers on Instagram.
“It is unacceptable that a 13-year-old girl gets propositioned on social media,” Bejar testified, citing a statistic from his research finding that more than 25% of 13-to-15-year-olds have reported receiving unwanted sexual advances on Instagram. “...
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