, Arturo Béjar, a former director of engineering for Protect and Care at Facebook, sent CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives an email regarding the harms that young people may face while using the company's products.
Béjar was an engineering director at Meta between 2009 and 2015, during which time he was responsible for protecting Facebook users. He supported a team that worked on"bullying tools for teens, suicide prevention, child safety and other difficult moments that people go through," according to Béjar claimed that Instagram and internal research teams gathered data showing that younger teens dealt with"great distress and abuse." However,"senior management was externally reporting different data that grossly understated the frequency of harm experienced by users," he told senators.
"That was unusual," Béjar said in his testimony."It might have happened, but I don’t recall Mark ever not responding to me previously in numerous communications, either by email or by asking for an in-person meeting."that Meta has to change its approach to moderating its platforms.
"My experience, after sending that email and seeing what happened afterwards, is that they knew, there were things they could do about it, they chose not to do them and we cannot trust them with our children," Béjar said during the hearing."It's time for Congress to act. The evidence, I believe, is overwhelming."