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Meta was infused with a culture in which employees obsessed over user numbers and consistently pushed safety to the side, according to Arturo Béjar, a former employee turned whistleblower, who testified today in the landmark child safety trial against the social media company. Only one man had the ability to change that, Béjar said: CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But he didn't.
"At the end of the day, it was the company culture that Mark had created that made it so that it was practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the wellbeing and safety issues that we've been talking about," he said.
Béjar is a linchpin witness for a consortium of states led by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey that sued Meta, alleging violations of consumer and child data protection laws, and that the company lied to the public about risks its platforms posed. The attorneys for the states say Meta designed Facebook and Instagram to hook young users and to keep them on site longer thanks to features such as infinite scrolling and the "like" button.
Meta has denied the allegations. In his opening statement on Tuesday, attorney Paul Schmidt argued that the company was sensitive to the risks to teens, sought to address them and did not deceive the public about them.
The state attorneys have not yet said if they will call Zuckerberg as a witness.
Testifying in federal court in Oakland, California, for a second day on Wednesday, Béjar, who worked on safety issues at Meta for eight years, said he interacted with Zuckerberg dozens of times, and charged that Zuckerberg was not telling the truth when he made public denials that the company put profits over safety.
In particular, Béjar addressed a widely-shared Facebook post Zuckerberg made in 2021 after another whistleblower, Frances Haugen, shared internal documents with The Wall Street Journal that highlighted risks to the mental health of teens. In the post, Zuckerberg said it's "just not true" that Meta prioritizes profit over safety and wellbeing.
"Based on my experience at Meta, that is not an accurate statement," Béjar said.
On the stand, Béjar noted that he'd seen several internal Meta studies that highlighted risks for teens on Facebook and Instagram. The studies surveyed users, including teenagers, about their experiences with harmful content on the platforms and negative feelings associated with them.
But he said efforts to introduce or change features to effectively address those risks were difficult to implement. Instead, Béjar testified, at almost every turn the company chose policies that boosted usership and revenue over safety. Safety was "not a meaningful priority," he said.
Béjar worked at Facebook from 2009 to 2015, largely focusing on cyberbullying. He returned to the company from 2019 to 2021 as a consultant to work on Instagram's wellbeing team. He said one of the reasons for his return was seeing how his daughter was treated as a teen on Instagram.
This is not the first time Béjar has spoken out against his former employer. In 2023, he testified before a Senate committee alleging that Meta pushed content to teens that promoted bullying, drug abuse, eating disorders and self-harm. He also gave an extensive interview to The Wall Street Journal that year, describing his efforts to raise his concerns with his employer.
The current case, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is a high-stakes test of efforts to hold Meta accountable, not for the content on its platforms, but for the features it built into its platforms. The states allege they were designed to encourage compulsive use, and that the company stood to financially benefit from keeping young users on site, because it makes its money through advertising. The more users scroll — and the better-targeted ads they see — the more Meta stands to profit.
It is one of thousands of lawsuits against social media companies alleging that their platforms are addictive and have fueled youth mental health problems.
On cross examination, Meta attorney Brian Stekloff asked Béjar about the quality of the people he worked with at Meta and whether or not he had "solved" any of the safety risks he had worked on, in an apparent effort to highlight the complexity and difficulty of these challenges.
Béjar said the teams he worked with were full of qualified people whom he respected, and that none of the risk issues had been solved.
He called features like video autoplay, "like" counters and infinite scroll "inherently unsafe for teenagers."
And when it came to safety features Meta has introduced to try to minimize some of the risks, Béjar said they were "designed to fail." Features like Instagram's "quiet mode," which can mute push notifications, are ineffective because they are optional settings rather than defaults, he said.
"Most people will not turn the setting on," he said. "It's like you have to turn on the air bag every time you get into the car."
The trial is expected to last about six weeks.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which was founded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, is a financial supporter of NPR.
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