Former engineer Arturo Béjar testifies that the company prioritized profits over child safety and ignored internal alerts.
AI-generated summary
Meta faces a class-action lawsuit from 29 US states over the negative impact of its platforms on the mental health of minors.
Meta sits in the dock in the trial being held in Oakland (California), for the lawsuit in which it is claimed that the Facebook and Instagram applications of Mark Zuckerberg's company knowingly harmed the mental health of children and adolescents. All for business, would be their maxim according to the attorneys general of 29 US states and an internal witness.
During the first two days of the oral hearing, the leading role from the witness stand belonged to Arturo Béjar, a Mexican security engineer who held high-level positions in Meta for about eight years, in two periods. Once he left the company in 2021, he has been an outspoken critic of Meta's child welfare practices. He has already testified before a US Senate committee and in another case related to social networks that involve harm to minors.
But on another occasion he was much more forceful and stressed that the company knew the harmful potential of its products and that Zuckerberg lied when expressing concern for the safety of minors. Meta has adopted a “don't ask, don't tell” approach when it comes to child safety on its social media platforms.
Although there have been other trials, the one now underway is considered the most momentous for this technological giant. If it loses, in addition to a fine that could reach $1.4 billion, the matter has the potential to fundamentally change the way the company's social media platforms operate.
One of Béjar's motivations for acting as an informant was to see how her own teenage daughter was treated on Instagram. She reported that she received unwanted sexual advances and photographs of male genitalia, as well as misogynistic insults. Her daughter later told her that reporting this abuse through Instagram's established procedures was ineffective or outright impossible.
Béjar highlighted that he began conducting surveys about the experiences of adolescents on that platform. It found that 51% of users answered yes when asked if they had had negative or harmful experiences over the previous seven days. In his testimony he maintained that, of all that content, Instagram only removed 0.02%.
He also stressed that he sent those results to top managers, including Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, chief executive of Instagram, who are expected to be called to testify, without them paying any attention to him.
Meta's lawyer, who defended the company's practices, tried to downplay that confession by highlighting the good working relationship that the engineer maintained with both the company and its leaders. Béjar responded with a brief “yes” to questions about the support he received from Zuckerberg or whether he was still proud of his work in society.
However, the witness insisted that the company consistently prioritized benefits over the safety design of its products, so that everything focused on how long people used them, even if it was to the detriment of their mental health. “If you move away from the product, you are not going to make money,” Béjar stressed as Meta's philosophy.
AI outlook — possibilities, not facts
Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri will be called to testify.
Very likely · Within weeks
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