Arturo Béjar left Meta after warning about Instagram’s harm to teenagers

Arturo Béjar left Meta after warning that Instagram was harming teenagers, saying his concerns did not lead to meaningful change inside the company. He later testified against Meta repeatedly in US courts and hearings.

On 5 October 2021, Béjar emailed Mark Zuckerberg and other senior executives with findings from Instagram’s wellbeing team. Fifty-one percent of surveyed users said they had experienced something harmful in the previous seven days, but only 1% reported it, and just 2% of those reports led to content being removed—0.02% overall.

Among 13- to 15-year-olds, 24.4% said they had received unwanted advances and 21.8% said they had been bullied on the platform during the previous week. Béjar says Zuckerberg did not reply.

Béjar’s testimony against Meta

By 2023, Béjar had begun testifying before the US Senate and in other proceedings. By his count, he has testified under oath at least seven times; during a California trial in August brought by attorneys general from 29 states, he said: “You just cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids.”

The case concerned allegations that Meta knowingly designed products that could be addictive and harmful to minors. The company has rejected the claim that it prioritises profit over users’ safety and wellbeing.

His daughter’s Instagram experience

Béjar’s concerns were also shaped by his daughter’s experience. Around 2018, she told him that men regularly sent her sexist comments and unsolicited nude images on Instagram. She said reporting the behaviour produced no meaningful action: blocked users could create new accounts, while some conduct was judged not to violate Instagram’s rules.

Béjar spent eight years working for Facebook in total. He left amicably in 2015, then returned in 2019 on a two-year contract as a consultant to Instagram’s wellbeing team.

Product changes and internal warnings

Earlier in his career, Béjar worked on security, customer care and tools for younger users. He says changing a Facebook button from “report” to “I don’t want to see this” tripled the number of times teenagers used it.

After returning, Béjar said internal teams knew about addiction, Instagram’s harmful effects and the case of Molly Russell, a 14-year-old British girl whose depression was found by a coroner to have been exacerbated by social-media use, particularly Instagram. Béjar says the wellbeing team’s proposals were repeatedly weakened during internal reviews.

The day after Béjar’s October 2021 email, Zuckerberg told Facebook employees that claims the company prioritised profit over safety were untrue. Béjar, however, says he had already concluded that Meta knew about the scale of the problem.