WASHINGTON (CN) — As legislators look to bring the hammer down on Big Tech, an industry whistleblower told the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday that social media titan Meta has refused to heed warnings that its services promulgate harmful content to minors.
Arturo Bejar, who until 2021 was a contractor at Meta-owned Facebook, made news earlier this month when the Wall Street Journal reported that he had sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg laying out what he called a “critical gap” in how the company enforced reports of harmful content on their services, which include Facebook and photo-sharing platform Instagram.
Bejar told members of the Judiciary Committee’s technology subpanel Tuesday that he thought Zuckerberg and other Meta executives would take his concerns seriously.
“Years have gone by,” he said, “and millions of teens are having their mental health compromised, and are still being traumatized by unwanted sexual advances and harmful content on Instagram and other social media platforms.”
Bejar, who had left an earlier position at Facebook in 2015, explained that when he returned to the company in 2019 as a consultant, he was shocked by what he called “a culture that was consistently ignoring what teens were experiencing.”
Thinking that Meta executives were unaware of the issue, he spent a year trying to figure out exactly how many minors were being exposed to harmful content on the company’s platforms.
“Nobody was able to answer off the top of their head,”...
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