Former Meta insider recounts daughter’s Instagram ordeal

A former Meta safety specialist has told a federal jury that his 14-year-old daughter received unwanted sexual advances on Instagram, an experience he said exposed serious weaknesses in protections for young users and changed his understanding of risks on the platform.

Arturo Béjar, a former Facebook engineering director who later returned to Meta as a consultant, gave the testimony in Oakland, California, as the company faces a landmark trial over allegations that Facebook and Instagram were designed in ways that harmed children while Meta failed to disclose the scale of the risks.

Béjar said his daughter began encountering sexual advances and inappropriate material after creating a public Instagram account. He had previously worked on systems intended to reduce bullying and other harmful behaviour at Facebook, but said his daughter’s experience showed him that the safeguards he expected were not protecting teenagers from unwanted interactions.

The testimony places a personal episode at the centre of a broader case examining whether Meta adequately understood, measured and responded to harm experienced by children. California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are pursuing consumer-protection claims at the trial, while allegations involving the improper collection of data from children under 13 form part of litigation involving 29 states.

The states contend that Meta deliberately developed features capable of keeping young people engaged for extended periods, capitalising on adolescent psychological vulnerabilities while publicly presenting Facebook and Instagram as safer than internal evidence suggested.

Meta denies the allegations. The company maintains that it has spent years developing tools designed to protect teenagers, remove underage accounts, restrict unwanted contacts and detect potentially dangerous behaviour. Its lawyers have also challenged claims that there is an established scientific basis for describing social-media use among teenagers as an addiction caused by particular product features.

Béjar worked at Facebook from 2009 until 2015 and returned as an independent contractor between 2019 and 2021. His work included studying how people experienced harassment, bullying and other problems on Meta platforms and examining whether existing safety measurements accurately reflected those experiences.

He told jurors that one central problem was Meta’s emphasis on measuring the prevalence of content that breached formal platform rules. Such measurements, he argued, did not necessarily capture the frequency with which users encountered behaviour they regarded as threatening, sexual, humiliating or otherwise harmful.

Internal surveys conducted during his time with the company indicated substantial exposure among younger users. Béjar has previously disclosed that 13 per cent of Instagram users aged 13 to 15 surveyed by the company reported receiving an unwanted sexual advance during the previous seven days.

That distinction between prohibited content and harmful experiences has become an important element of the states’ case. Conduct that leaves a teenager distressed may not always breach a narrowly written platform policy, potentially leaving large categories of unwanted interaction outside traditional enforcement statistics.

Béjar said he raised concerns with senior Meta executives. In 2021, he sent an email to chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and other company leaders describing what he viewed as a serious gap between Meta’s safety measurements and what teenagers were actually experiencing. He also raised the issue with chief product officer Chris Cox.

His concerns later became public when he testified before a US Senate subcommittee in 2023. He told lawmakers then that his daughter and her friends had experienced repeated unwanted sexual advances and harassment and argued that Meta possessed the technical capability to give young users better ways to signal harmful encounters.

The Oakland proceedings began on August 18 and are expected to run for several weeks. The states are seeking substantial financial penalties and changes to Meta’s practices. The dispute is one of several major cases testing whether technology companies can be held legally responsible for product-design decisions alleged to have contributed to harm among children and teenagers.

Meta has already faced an adverse verdict in New Mexico, where litigation focused heavily on child exploitation, platform safety and the ability of predators to contact young users. A jury awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and penalties, and Meta has contested the outcome.

The company has meanwhile expanded protections for younger users. Teen Accounts on Instagram automatically apply stricter privacy and messaging settings, limit sensitive content and restrict who can contact teenagers. Meta says it also uses technology to identify suspicious adults, prevent potentially predatory accounts from finding young users and remove accounts belonging to people who violate child-safety rules.