Béjar tells jury Meta's teen safeguards were 'designed to fail'

Arturo Béjar, a former Meta safety engineer, took the stand as the first witness in a trial brought by 29 state attorneys general and told jurors that Instagram's teen safety features were "designed to fail," NPR reported.

Béjar worked at Meta from 2009 to 2015 on cyberbullying, then returned from 2019 to 2021 as a consultant to Instagram's wellbeing team. He testified he had briefed Zuckerberg on product issues at least 100 times, and that after the CEO said publicly in 2021 that Meta did not put profit over safety, Béjar emailed him to object. "Based on my experience at Meta, that is not an accurate statement," he told the jury. He also said Zuckerberg's public framing had "created a false and misleading impression of Facebook's commitment to young people."

"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," Béjar testified. He called video autoplay, "like" counters and infinite scroll "inherently unsafe for teenagers," and dismissed opt-in safeguards with an analogy: "Most people will not turn the setting on. It's like you have to turn on the air bag every time you get into the car."

Meta attorney Paul Schmidt told the court the company was sensitive to teen risks, had tried to address them, and did not deceive the public.

The case, led by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, is being heard in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, and is expected to run about six weeks. It lands in the middle of a heavy stretch of Meta stories on our radar, including reports of teen boys using Meta Ray-Bans to film girls in US schools.