February 18, 2026, 22:25 GMT | Comment
As former
Meta Platforms executives took the stand last week in a lawsuit against the company, they shared hope that social media could connect people and be a tool for good rather than harm. Former executives Brian Boland and Arturo Bejar both testified last week in
New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez’s lawsuit against the social media platform. Boland, Bejar, and Torrez all said that they hope changes can be made to Meta’s platforms as an outcome of the litigation.
As former Meta Platforms executives took the stand last week in a lawsuit against the company, they shared hope that social media could connect people and be a tool for good rather than harm.
“I think that's the reason that I'm here, and part of the reason that this conversation is important is that I do believe that this could have turned out differently, and the harms are preventable,” said Brian Boland, Meta’s former vice president of partnerships.
Boland and Arturo Bejar, the former director of engineering for Meta, both testified last week in New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez’s lawsuit against the social media platform. Boland, Bejar and Torrez all said last week that they hope changes can be made to Meta’s platforms as an outcome of the litigation.
Both former executives, who joined the company in 2009 after working at other tech companies, were eager to help connect people and grow connections through the internet. However, they both find themselves speaking out against the company after what they described as its leadership failing to take accountability and change the harm being done to children through the platform.
Torrez is alleging the company violated consumer protection laws by misleading and deceiving consumers about how much harm children faced on its platforms, putting profits over people (see
here).
Speaking at a news conference last week, Torrez said he hopes that jurors find Meta liable after hearing all the evidence during the trial, and that Judge Bryan Biedscheid in Santa Fe would order remedies, including forcing Meta to redesign its platforms and stop using design features such as infinite scrolling to keep kids online longer.
“If we can win in this action here, and we can force them to at least make their product safe in this state, it changes the narrative completely about what they say is possible for everyone else,” Torrez said.
Meta says the state is “cherry-picking” evidence and that the platform has tried to improve itself for the safety of its users while maintaining a profitable business.
— Promise of Meta —
CEO Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook as a social network — a place to connect online with people you knew in the real world — from his Harvard dorm room.
Boland and Bejar described feeling that ethos of connection during their testimony.
Bejar, who first worked for the company from 2009 to 2015, had nothing but positive things to say about the company during that time.
“Everyone involved has good intentions, makes choices, makes mistakes, and I loved how open everyone is about learning from them,” Bejar said at the time, according to a note that Meta attorney Alex Parkinson read during the trial.
Bejar agreed that it was his sentiment at the time when he left the company to spend more time with his children.
But “Meta has really changed since I made that statement,” he said last week.
Bejar returned to Meta to work with the Well-Being Team in 2019 after his daughter and her friends expressed having bad interactions on
Instagram.
“My experience of [Meta] has been that they cared about this issue,” Bejar said. “I did not understand why my daughter was experiencing that and why she wouldn't have the tools that helped her to deal with these things.”
That’s when he decided to “roll up his sleeves” and get to work helping teens like his daughter.
However, Bejar saw that the company’s approach to safety deteriorated from its earliest days, he said (see
here).
He ultimately grew dissatisfied with Meta's policies regarding children, and he testified before Congress about harms to children on the platform in 2023 (see
here).
“I do believe these products have good in them. The problem is that they also have a tremendous amount of preventable harm, and we shouldn't treat that harm as acceptable. And so I didn't see on the ground evidence that all these things that they were building were safe and good for kids,” which is why he came forward, Bejar said during the trial.
Boland, who worked for the company from 2009 to 2020, described a similar “growth over safety” mentality in the company as it grew (see
here).
He said the company that promised to bring people together ultimately was not doing so by the end of his time with Meta.
“People always talk about these products for Meta being a public square, a town square where everyone can talk and share ideas, and it's just like a gathering place. And it'd be awesome if that's what it was,” Boland said.
Instead, by 2020 he realized it was as if “there's a giant stage at one end of the town square that has big speakers and a microphone, and there's somebody who's choosing who in the town square gets to speak. And so everyone else's voices get drowned out by whoever gets chosen to speak. And so I felt like we were choosing speakers. We were actively deciding what the town square was hearing,” Boland said.
— Criticizing the darling of Silicon Valley —
Bejar and Boland both testified about how hard it was to make their decisions to come forward.
Bejar had to speak with his family and knew his daughter’s story would be in the spotlight, he said.
Boland described his “personal costs” in greater detail.
His relationship with people within the company and within the broader Silicon Valley investment community would likely be affected by his decision to speak out, he said.
“That's a very powerful investment community that would not look favorably on me criticizing a company that's the darling of Silicon Valley, I knew that that would be a personal cost,” Boland said.
It’s stressful and not a “comfortable thing to do, to put yourself in a position against one of the most powerful companies in the world and some of the most powerful people in the world,” he said.
When Zuckerberg was talking about the impact of the company, Boland said, he always spoke of a “ledger where we were keeping track of what was good and what was bad, was harmful that was created by Facebook,” but there was never a ledger or an accounting.
Boland also said that he didn't think the benefits of the products outweigh the harms.
“As time has gone by and I've seen and learned more things, I'm more increased than ever that, in my opinion, the ledger's on the more harmful side. I'd love to know, and I think as a society, we deserve to know,” Boland said.
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