There’s a new Meta whistleblower in town: Arturo Béjar, a longtime employee who came forward to the Wall Street Journal last week to accuse the social media giant of knowing, through its own research, that its platforms were hurting children. Not only did Meta refuse to act on that information, Béjar asserted, but it also tried to cover it up. On Tuesday, he repeated those allegations to a very receptive Senate subcommittee.
This comes two years after another whistleblower made similar claims, and at a time when state and federal governments are still trying to figure out how to regulate the platforms they believe are harmful to children’s mental health, safety, and privacy. Béjar’s allegations may be the boost needed to get stalled children’s online safety bills passed — just as the previous whistleblower was a catalyst for some of those bills’ introduction.
Béjar worked at Meta, then Facebook, as an engineering director on its Protect and Care Team from 2009 to 2015 and as a consultant on Instagram’s Well-Being Team from 2019 to 2021. He says that Meta knew, through research that he conducted and conversations he had with some of the company’s most powerful executives, that kids were frequently exposed to things like unwanted sexual advances and harmful content — sometimes recommended by Meta’s own algorithms. But the company chose not to implement measures Béjar believed would help, ultimately ending the research Béjar was involved in and laying off many members of his team.
Before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology, and the law, Béjar called for legislation to address…
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