A former Meta safety engineer told a federal jury this week that company leaders repeatedly received warnings about harm to children on Facebook and Instagram and largely failed to act.
Quartz reports that Arturo Béjar, who worked as a safety engineer at Meta, testified that the company operated under what he described as a “don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy toward child safety. He said internal studies showed children encountering harmful material at elevated rates, including recommendations that surfaced content from sexual predators and graphic violent images. Béjar said he brought these findings to Facebook and Instagram executives multiple times, and those conversations produced little meaningful change.
Béjar also testified that during his second stint at Meta, from 2019 to 2021, the company replaced the term “addiction” with “problematic use,” a framing he said did not meet the thresholds academic researchers use to define addiction. He said the metrics Meta made public gave a false picture of safety because they measured violations of content policies rather than actual harm experienced by users.
Béjar told the jury that in 2021 he emailed Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg after Zuckerberg publicly stated that 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 said he briefed Zuckerberg on product issues at least 100 times during his tenure at the company.
Béjar was the first witness called in the trial, which opened Tuesday in federal court in Oakland, California, before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. The case was brought by 29 state attorneys general who allege Meta intentionally designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to minors, collected data on children under 13 without parental consent in violation of the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and misled the public about platform safety. Opening arguments were delivered by lawyers representing California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey.
Meta attorney Paul Schmidt argued that the states had selectively quoted internal documents to build a misleading narrative. He pointed to the company’s safety measures, including parental controls, privacy defaults for teenage users, and reminders encouraging users to limit time on the app.
Hellbound and Down 