A massive trial is underway in California, where state attorneys general are holding Meta’s feet to the fire for its role in fueling a children’s mental health crisis.
According to the testimony of former Meta safety engineer Arturo Béjar, the company has purposefully adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it comes to keeping children safe on its platforms, the Guardian reported.
Throughout his time on the witness stand, Béjar asserted that Meta has known its platform is actively harming children, pushing things like violent and predatory sexual content onto their feeds.
Béjar, whose role in the company reportedly involved briefing CEO Mark Zuckerberg on safety issues, said that executives were well aware of the issues, but weren’t in any hurry to solve them, despite repeated assurances that Meta and its platforms Instagram and Facebook “don’t prioritize profit over safety,” per the Guardian.
“I felt that he created a false and misleading impression of Facebook’s commitment to young people,” Béjar said in his testimony.
Béjar’s claims track with similar statements made by former Meta insiders. Last year, former Facebook pubic policy director Sarah Wynn-Williams released a dizzying book claiming that the company had been exploring ways to expand targeted ads to minors as early as 2017.
In one instance, Wynn-Williams recalled a pitch deck shared with potential advertisers that bragged it could exploit “moments of psychological vulnerability” in users, through hyper-specific terms like “worthless,” “insecure,” and “useless.” This extended beyond text-based posts, the author explained, as Facebook even tracked when adolescent girls deleted selfies “so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment.”
While it remains to be seen whether California’s attorneys can bring the tech giant to heel, the motivations driving the company’s CEO seem abundantly clear.
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