Former Facebook Director of Engineering Arturo Béjar testifies that Mark Zuckerberg prioritized Facebook and Instagram's growth and engagement over child safety
A former engineering director at Meta Platforms (META.O) testified on Wednesday that CEO Mark Zuckerberg fostered a culture …
Reuters
Context & Ripple Effects
Béjar has repeatedly described a gap between Meta’s internal warnings and its response: his 2023 Senate testimony alleged executives downplayed teen harms, while related court filings described leaders rejecting stronger guardrails and additional staffing. The new testimony extends that record from a former engineering leader to Zuckerberg’s stated operating priorities.
The related coverage also ties those priorities to product choices, including Instagram’s campaign to win back teen users. That makes the testimony consequential beyond a single personnel dispute: it bears on whether safety trade-offs were embedded in Facebook and Instagram’s growth strategy.
First-order effects
Meta and Zuckerberg face a more developed public record alleging that growth and engagement took precedence over child safety across Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook and Instagram teams’ teen-engagement and recommendation decisions are placed under sharper scrutiny because the testimony connects product incentives with safety warnings.
Platforms competing for younger users face greater pressure to show that retention-oriented product changes include enforceable safety guardrails rather than merely stated commitments.
Third-order effects
If testimony and court records continue to align, child-safety oversight will increasingly test platform governance through the incentives and measurement systems behind product decisions, not only through individual features.
Trust becomes operating infrastructure for large social platforms: sustained evidence of misaligned safety incentives can raise the cost of pursuing engagement-led growth strategies.
The trend: The case is part of a broader shift toward evaluating social platforms’ child-safety claims against their internal growth incentives and product-governance record.
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/
Something that came up in my 2024 @WIRED investigation into 764/com was the wide prevalence of those groups on Instagram. Posts that were 2, three years old with tons of 764 iconography/gore/cutsigns were all on public accounts Meta faces a huge reckoning https://www.theguardian.…
In case you wanna subject yourself to a ridiculous level of suffering, here's the OG 764 deep dive. You'll see we did not pull punches when it came to the tech platforms that are now all in court over extreme child safety issues https://www.wired.com/...
Meta trial update: @AGRobBonta's office confirms that plaintiffs expect to call Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a witness. Deputy AG Megan O'Neill said during her opening yesterday that plaintiffs also plan to grill Instagram head Adam Mosseri and Antigone Davis, Meta's global head
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/...
Trial began yesterday in the multistate case against Meta, which alleges the company's social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, are harming kids and designed to be addictive. @newsobserver https://www.newsobserver.com/ ...
.@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/...
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.
'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.” — …