On the same day whistleblower Frances Haugen was testifying before Congress about the harms of Facebook and Instagram to children in the fall of 2021, a former engineering director at the social media giant who had rejoined the company as a consultant sent an alarming email to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the same topic.
Arturo Béjar, known for his expertise on curbing online harassment, recounted to Zuckerberg his own daughter’s troubling experiences with Instagram. But he said his concerns and warnings went unheeded. And on Tuesday, it was Béjar’s turn to testify to Congress.
“I appear before you today as a dad with firsthand experience of a child who received unwanted sexual advances on Instagram,” he told a panel of U.S. senators.
Béjar worked as an engineering director at Facebook from 2009 to 2015, attracting wide attention for his work to combat cyberbullying. He thought things were getting better. But between leaving the company and returning in 2019 as a contractor, Béjar’s own daughter had started using Instagram.
“She and her friends began having awful experiences, including repeated unwanted sexual advances, harassment,” he testified Tuesday. “She reported these incidents to the company and it did nothing.”
In the 2021 note, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Béjar 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.”
Béjar testified before a 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.
He 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 don’t clearly violate existing policies.
For instance, sending vulgar sexual messages to children doesn’t necessarily break Instagram’s rules, but Béjar said teens should have a way to tell the platform they don’t want to receive these types of messages.
“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,” Béjar told The Associated Press. This, he said, makes it clear that “we can’t trust them with our children.”
Opening the hearing Tuesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary’s privacy and technology subcommittee, introduced Béjar 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 Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, the panel’s ranking Republican.
Béjar pointed to user surveys carefully crafted by the company that show, for instance, that 13% of Instagram users — ages 13-15 — reported having received unwanted sexual advances on the platform within the previous seven days.
Béjar said he doesn’t believe the reforms he’s 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.
