Meta’s Child-Safety Defense Collides With Whistleblower Testimony

Meta’s Child-Safety Defense Collides With Whistleblower Testimony
Meta’s defense of its child-safety record is colliding with testimony from a former engineer who says the company understood the risks to young users—and repeatedly chose not to confront them. The trial could force changes to a business model built on maximizing attention and advertising revenue.

Arturo Béjar, a former Meta safety engineer, told the jury that Facebook and Instagram exposed children to sexual predators, graphic violence and other harmful material. He said he raised concerns with senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, whom he briefed roughly 100 times. After Zuckerberg publicly said Meta did not put profit ahead of safety, Béjar testified that he felt the statement created “a false and misleading impression of Facebook’s commitment to young people.”

Béjar’s account presents the company’s internal response as the central failure. He said he sent warnings directly to Zuckerberg because “when Mark makes something a priority, mountains move,” but added that the CEO never responded. His research, he testified, found that 51% of surveyed teenagers had experienced something harmful on Instagram in the previous week, while the content was removed only 0.02% of the time.

The state attorneys general characterize those failures as deliberate: Meta allegedly designed addictive products, collected data from children under 13 and misled the public about the risks. California’s deputy attorney general told jurors, “Meta didn’t do its share.”

Meta’s position is narrower but sharply different. Its lawyer acknowledged that social media can create problems while arguing that the company had developed tools to address them, barred under-13 users from registering and disabled more than one million such accounts. The conservative account likewise foregrounds the allegation that Instagram adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach toward children under 13, reinforcing the criticism without supplying a separate defense.

The dispute therefore turns on intent: whether Meta’s safeguards represent an imperfect effort to manage known harms—or a calculated compromise in favor of engagement, advertising and growth.