“An engineer hired specifically by Facebook to help protect against harms to children,” is how U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced his key witness in hearings on Social Media and the Teen Mental Health Crisis.
The engineer, a whistleblower named Arturo Bejar, was charged by his employer with making “recommendations for making Facebook safer.”
LIVE: My Judiciary Subcommittee is hearing from a whistleblower who warned Facebook & Meta’s senior leadership about the harms their products are causing young people. Instead of acting, Meta hid the problem & did nothing to fix it. That must end now. https://t.co/Eul76bBG7c
— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) November 7, 2023
Bejar brought evidence, he says, directly to top management at Facebook/Meta, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, only for Meta to largely neglect to act, other than by pursuing actions to stifle the evidence Bejar uncovered.
Bejar, according to Blumenthal, gave Zuckerberg a memo reporting that in just a single week, half of Facebook’s users had “bad or harmful experiences.”
Instead of real reform upon receipt of that information, Facebook did the opposite, Blumenthal asserts, and “hid from all of Congress” evidence that social media was causing harm to its users. The company even rolled back some of the existing protections, he says.
A previous witness Blumenthal quotes said Instagram “exacerbates downward spirals of addiction, eating disorders and depression.”
But Bejar is distinguished among whistleblowers, Blumenthal asserts, by being the “first to show in documents” how he warned Facebook management — and the reaction his warnings garnered. Blumenthal says Facebook “took action only two percent of the time” upon receiving notice of bad behavior.
