Former Meta engineering director Arturo Béjar testifies that Mark Zuckerberg prioritized growth and engagement over child safety on Facebook and Instagram
A former engineering director at Meta Platforms (META.O) testified on Wednesday that CEO Mark Zuckerberg fostered a culture …
Reuters
Context & Ripple Effects
Béjar previously told the Senate that Meta executives ignored warnings about teen harms and shaped metrics to downplay them in his earlier Senate account. Later court filings similarly described Zuckerberg and other executives rejecting stronger guardrails while minimizing risks to young users in the internal-record disclosures.
The new testimony moves the story from disputed product decisions to a more direct account of leadership priorities. It also gives fresh context to reported Instagram efforts to win back teens through recommendation changes and teen-focused influencer promotion.
First-order effects
Béjar’s testimony concentrates accountability on Zuckerberg and Meta leadership, rather than framing child-safety shortcomings as isolated decisions by Facebook or Instagram product teams.
Meta’s teen-engagement tactics face renewed scrutiny because the testimony connects the company’s stated safety tradeoffs to the priorities behind growth and engagement.
Second-order effects
Meta’s safety defenses must now contend with a public record that links engagement incentives to the same teen-retention choices described in the related coverage.
For Instagram, efforts to increase teen return visits become harder to evaluate separately from child-safety claims, raising the stakes for how the platform justifies recommendation and creator-promotion decisions.
Third-order effects
If this pattern continues to be substantiated through testimony and internal records, child safety will be treated less as a moderation feature and more as a test of whether platform leadership can constrain engagement-led product design.
The broader pressure is toward making trust a core platform operating requirement, because safety claims lose credibility when internal incentives point in the opposite direction.
The trend: The story is part of a shift in which platform child-safety scrutiny increasingly examines leadership incentives and growth design, not only individual content policies.
If you think the fines being sought against Meta are high, at 200 B, remember that Meta has been harming children at an industrial scale for 2 decades. They knew it, their own research showed it. We organized 35 of their own studies here: https://metasinternalresearch.org/
It sure seems Meta, and the people it funds, is working super hard to make the massive child harm trial about risk of a hyperbolic amount of money, as if that's why the AGs brought the case, and age verification across social media, to freak out everyone's kids. Both are false.
.@Meta is standing trial in federal court because the company designed its platforms to addict and harm our children. This is only the beginning of the fight for accountability. The next step is for Congress to send KOSA to the President's desk. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Standing up against social media giants and fighting for our kids future is among the most important work I will do as Colorado's AG. I continued to be inspired by parents who have suffered loss and are calling out Big Tech companies for their actions. https://apnews.com/...
'Bejar said he flagged concerns about the platform's impact on young users to Meta leadership. “Young people were experiencing harm at extraordinarily high rates,” he said. “A parent would have wanted to have known” that reality.' www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...
“Meta has taken a “don't ask, don't tell” strategy when it comes to the safety of children on its social media platforms, according to a whistleblower who testified during a landmark trial against the company on Tuesday. He is slated to continue his testimony on Wednesday.” — …