Former Meta consultant Arturo Béjar, who blew the whistle on Instagram’s handling of teen safety, has said he does not recall Mark Zuckerberg ever showing empathy towards people harmed by the company’s products.
Speaking to the Guardian, Béjar said the Meta chief executive was motivated above all by winning. “I don’t recall him ever being empathetic to the harm that somebody was experiencing and wanting to make that better,” he said. “The only thing that really consistently came across in all my interactions with him was winning. He’s one of the most fiercely competitive people I know.”
Béjar, who worked at Facebook for a total of eight years, has testified under oath against Meta at least seven times since 2023, in trials and hearings. In his most recent testimony, at a landmark California trial brought by the attorneys general of 29 US states, he told the court: “You just cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids.”
Meta abandoned its challenge to that case and settled two days after Béjar gave evidence, agreeing to pay up to $18bn (£13.6bn) while denying any wrongdoing. The company also agreed for the first time to major protections for teens, including two-hour daily time limits for under-18s across Instagram and Facebook, blocking notifications during school hours, blocking the apps at night, turning off autoplay and giving parents greater control.
Béjar’s decision to speak out was rooted in his daughter’s experience. When she was in her early teens, around 2018, she told him she regularly received sexist comments and unsolicited nude photos from men via Instagram, as did her female friends. She told her father that reporting the content was pointless because it never resulted in meaningful action.
In October 2021, on the same day Frances Haugen testified to the US Senate, Béjar sent an email to Zuckerberg and other senior executives setting out statistics from his team’s survey. It found that 24.4% of 13-15-year-olds on Instagram had received unwanted advances, 21.8% had been the target of bullying in the previous seven days, and 51% of users had had a bad or harmful experience in that period. Only 1% reported it, and of those, 2% had the content taken down. Zuckerberg never replied.
Béjar said that when he returned to the company in 2019 as a consultant on Instagram’s wellbeing team, he initially believed Zuckerberg was unaware of the harms. “What I started finding when I came back is that they did know,” he said. “They knew about addiction, they knew how bad it was. They knew about Molly Russell.”
He said the wellbeing team’s proposals were routinely stripped back by internal review processes until little remained, and that growth was prioritised over safety. He described Instagram as “built on three pillars: addictive design, connecting you to strangers, and rewarding you for doing things that are exhibitionistic, performative or aggressive”.
Béjar, 55, was born in Mexico City, taught himself to code and joined IBM at 15. He worked at Yahoo for 11 years before joining Facebook in 2009, where he led engineering and product work on security and customer care, developing tools such as a reporting button that let teens signal “I don’t want to see this”. He left amicably in 2015 during a divorce, and returned in 2019.
He said Zuckerberg could shift the company’s approach within months if he chose to. “If Mark woke up tomorrow and was like, ‘I want to create something that’s genuinely good for kids,’ it would take the company six months to fundamentally shift all these things and drive all these harms down,” he said.
Meta lost a separate trial brought by the US state of New Mexico in March over misleading the public about safety, and was ordered to pay $942m (£713.7m) in fines and damages. Dozens more cases are pending.
A Meta spokesperson said: “We all share a common goal of providing safe, meaningful online experiences for young people. Our record shows that we’ve spent the past decade researching and developing numerous tools and resources to support teens and empower parents, including Teen Accounts, which place teens in protective settings by default.”
Béjar is calling for independent assessment and comparison of the safety of social media sites, similar to the monitoring of vehicle emissions. “Every parent and every kid deserves to know: what is the likelihood that this bad thing is going to happen to you on any of these services?” he said. “It’s still just the beginning, but I do feel hope.”
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