On the same day whistle-blower Frances Haugen was testifying before US Congress about the harms of Facebook and Instagram to children in the fall of 2021, Arturo Bejar, then a contractor at the social media giant, sent an alarming e-mail to Meta Platforms Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the same topic.
In the note, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Bejar, who worked as an engineering director at Facebook from 2009 to 2015, outlined a “critical gap” between how the company approached harm and how the people who use its products — most notably young people — experience it.
“Two weeks ago my daughter, 16, and an experimenting creator on Instagram, made a post about cars, and someone commented ‘Get back to the kitchen.’ It was deeply upsetting to her,” he wrote. “At the same time the comment is far from being policy violating, and our tools of blocking or deleting mean that this person will go to other profiles and continue to spread misogyny. I don’t think policy/reporting or having more content review are the solutions.”
Photo: AP
Bejar believes that Meta needs to change how it polices its platforms, with a focus on addressing harassment, unwanted sexual advances and other bad experiences even if these problems do not clearly violate existing policies. For instance, sending vulgar sexual messages to children does not necessarily break Instagram’s rules, but Bejar said teens should have a way to tell the platform they do not want to receive these types of messages.
Two years later, Bejar testified before a US Senate subcommittee on Tuesday about social media and the teen mental health crisis, hoping to shed light on how Meta executives, including Zuckerberg, knew about the harms Instagram was causing, but chose not to make meaningful changes to address them.
“I can safely say that Meta’s executives knew the harm that teenagers were experiencing, that there were things that they could do that are very doable and that they chose not to do them,” Bejar said.
This makes it clear that “we can’t trust them with our children,” he said.
Opening the hearing on Tuesday, US Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary’s privacy and technology subcommittee, introduced Bejar as an engineer “widely respected and admired in the industry” who was hired specifically to help prevent harms against children but whose recommendations were ignored.
“What you have brought to this committee today is something every parent needs to hear,” added US Senator Josh Hawley, the panel’s ranking Republican.
Bejar points to user perception surveys that show, for instance, that 13 percent of Instagram users — ages 13 to 15 — reported having received unwanted sexual advances on the platform within the previous seven days.
Bejar said he does not believe the reforms he is suggesting would significantly affect revenue or profits for Meta and its peers.
They are not intended to punish the companies, he said, but to help teenagers.
“You heard the company talk about it ‘oh this is really complicated,’” Bejar said. “No, it isn’t. Just give the teen a chance to say ‘this content is not for me’ and then use that information to train all of the other systems and get feedback that makes it better.”
Bejar’s testimony comes just two weeks after dozens of US states sued Meta for harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis. The lawsuits, filed in state and federal courts, claim that Meta knowingly and deliberately designs features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.
“The most effective way to regulate social media companies is to require them to develop metrics that will allow both the company and outsiders to evaluate and track instances of harm, as experienced by users. This plays to the strengths of what these companies can do, because data for them is everything,” Bejar wrote in his prepared testimony.
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