Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar said there was still no way for a teen to flag an unwanted advance on Instagram or Facebook.
Earlier this week, Meta introduced a set of new policies aimed at safeguarding teen users on its platforms, Facebook and Instagram. These updates come in under the shadow of a massive lawsuit against Meta and other tech giants such as TikTok owner ByteDance and Google’s YouTube in relation to child safety on their platforms. However a Meta whistleblower has said the updates don’t address 99pc of the harmful content on the platforms.
In a nutshell, the complex case includes accusations that the tech companies have intentionally designed their platforms to be addictive – and minors are especially at risk. Lack of parental controls, lack of age verification and potentially harmful algorithms are other concerns being raised in the lawsuit.
There was quite a lot of focus on Meta’s part in all of this around November 2023 when a whistleblower spoke to a US senate judiciary committee about his time at the company. Arturo Béjar, who worked for Meta as a consultant to support Instagram’s wellbeing team around 2019, claimed that the company was fully aware of the harm its platforms are causing young users and their policies do little to prevent that harm.
He accused his former employer of continuing to “publicly misrepresent the level and frequency of harm that users, especially children, experience on the platform”. He said that...
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