Meta $META -4.45% whistleblower Arturo Béjar testified before a federal jury on Tuesday that the company operated under a "don't ask, don't tell" philosophy toward child safety, painting a picture of leadership that received repeated warnings about harm to young users and largely ignored them. Béjar is set to continue his testimony on Wednesday.
Béjar, a former Meta safety engineer, testified that internal studies documented children encountering harmful material — including recommendations surfacing content from sexual predators and graphic violent images — at elevated rates, and that he brought those findings to Facebook and Instagram executives on multiple occasions without seeing meaningful action. He said those conversations produced little meaningful change.
He also testified that during his second tenure at Meta, from 2019 to 2021, the company substituted the phrase "problematic use" for "addiction" — a framing he said fell short of thresholds that academic researchers use to define addiction. Béjar said the metrics Meta made public painted a false picture of safety, because they measured violations of content policies rather than actual harm to users.
In one instance, Béjar said he emailed Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2021 after Zuckerberg made public statements saying the company does not prioritize profit over safety. "I felt that he created a false and misleading impression of Facebook's commitment to young people," Béjar testified. He estimated he briefed...
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