LONDON — A former insider at tech giant Meta has said that social media companies are failing to keep kids safe online, and that government regulators must step in.
“Regulators are our last hope at peace. They really are our last hope,” Arturo Béjar told POLITICO at a cafe in central London on Tuesday, shortly before a meeting with the country’s media regulator Ofcom, which will be tasked with enforcing Britain’s sprawling new internet rulebook, the Online Safety Act.
Béjar, who worked on safety at Meta during two stints over the last decade, claims his efforts to flag problems to senior leadership at the company went unheeded. He decided to go public with his concerns last year, testifying in evidence to the United States Congress in November that children, including his own daughter and her friends, were receiving unwanted sexual advances on Instagram.
According to the whistleblower, many of the measures he had implemented during his first stint at Meta, such as tools designed to make it easier to report problems, had gone when he returned to the company as a consultant in 2019.
“When you hear from the inside from Arturo [Béjar] that it isn’t getting better, it’s getting worse, what other mechanism do we have to say to these companies that this is not good enough? The only mechanism I can see is regulation,” said Ian Russell of the Molly Rose Foundation, which is shepherding Béjar around meetings with U.K. policymakers, including the Science and Tech Secretary Michelle...
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