Arturo Béjar claims Meta is aware of the harm its platforms can cause to young people and that policies fail to address these issues.
Another Meta whistleblower has spoken out against practices being taken by the company, with claims that the tech giant is aware of the harm teenagers face on its platforms but has failed to act.
This whistleblower – Arturo Béjar – claims that Meta has opted to give users “placebo” tools that fail to address the issues of teenagers seeing harmful content, having their mental health impacted and receiving “unwanted sexual advances” on Instagram.
“Meta continues to publicly misrepresent the level and frequency of harm that users, especially children, experience on the platform,” Béjar said.
“It is unacceptable that a 13-year-old girl gets propositioned on social media. Unfortunately it happens all too frequently today.”
Béjar is a former director of engineering for Meta – then called Facebook – who left in 2015. Béjar said he worked to “reduce online threats” while at the company and felt the “work was going in the right direction” when he left.
Speaking to a US senate judiciary committee yesterday (7 November), Béjar said he returned to the company in 2019 as a consultant to support Instagram’s wellbeing team. He added that one reason for this decision was that his own teenage daughter suffered abuse on Instagram, including unwanted sexual advances and harassment.
“She reported these incidents to the company and it did nothing,” Béjar said.
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