August 19, 2026, 23:51 GMT | Insight
Former Meta engineering director Arturo Bejar told jurors he personally warned Mark Zuckerberg in 2021 that the company was failing to understand harmful experiences facing young users, but the CEO never responded despite their longstanding working relationship.
Former Meta engineering director Arturo Bejar told a federal jury Wednesday that he personally warned
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2021 that the company was failing to understand the harmful experiences young users were having on its platforms
Bejar outlined his concerns in a lengthy email he sent Zuckerberg on October 5, 2021, just hours after Zuckerberg publicly defended Meta in response to whistleblower Frances Haugen’s congressional testimony that day.
California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are leading a group of 29 states suing Meta in the
US District Court for the Northern District of California for allegedly violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting and using personal information from children under 13 without parental notice and consent.
In his email, shown in court Wednesday, Bejar said he wanted to call Zuckerberg’s attention to what he believed was a “critical gap in how we as a company approach harm and how the people we serve experience it,” citing internal research showing high rates of bullying, negative social comparison and unwanted sexual advances among young
Instagram users.
He recounted his own teenage daughter’s experience receiving unwanted sexual advances and misogynistic comments on Instagram after she started posting about cars and gained a considerable following. Bejar told Zuckerberg that his daughter had been receiving unsolicited penis pictures since the age of 14, and that someone had posted “get back to the kitchen” in her comments. “Why does someone think it is ok to post ‘get back to the kitchen’ or harass someone?” Bejar wrote to Zuckerberg. “I believe it is because it doesn’t violate policy, and other than deleting or blocking, there is no feature that helps people know that kind of behavior is not ok.”
Bejar urged Zuckerberg to look beyond formal policies governing harmful content and instead build “visible product interventions” that would provide feedback to unintentional bad actors in order to “separate the people who would behave differently given feedback, from the ones who are intentionally causing harm.”
Earlier that day, Haugen had appeared before Congress and testified that Meta knew its products were causing harm and had kept internal research documenting the risks to young users under wraps.
In response, Zuckerberg circulated a note to employees rejecting what he called a false picture of the company that emerged from the testimony.
“At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true,” Zuckerberg wrote. “The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical. We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don't want their ads next to harmful or angry content. And I don't know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed. The moral, business and product incentives all point in the opposite direction.”
But Bejar’s email pointed to users’ experiences, noting that 31.8% of 13- to 15-year-olds said they were the target of bullying, 39.4% said they experienced negative comparison and 24.4% said they had received unwanted advances on Instagram.
As for his daughter’s experience, Bejar wrote thta it was “deeply upsetting to her” and “I don’t think policy/reporting or having more content review are the solutions.”
Colorado’s chief trial counsel, Jason Slothouber, asked Bejar if Zuckerberg ever responded to the email.
“No, he never wrote back,” Bejar said, adding that this was unusual given that he and Zuckerberg had a close working relationship in the eight years he had worked at the company. “This was the first time in 20 years where I sent an email to a CEO — which I had done many times — where I didn't hear back.”
Bejar worked for Facebook from 2009 through 2015, at which time he resigned to “be a parent” before returning in 2019 as a consultant on Instagram’s Well-Being Team. He left for good in 2021.
Bejar has been a key witness for the plaintiffs in the three previous addictive design trials against Meta this year, (see
here,
here and
here).
On Wednesday, he testified that he believed the company started out supporting safety for teens on its platforms, but ultimately gave greater weight to profit.
On cross-examination, Meta lawyer Brian Stekloff asked him about the “highly qualified” members of his team who continued to work on safety issues even after Bejar’s departure, and got Bejar to acknowledge that Zuckerberg relied on him to “resolve critical safety issues” during his tenure.
“He gave you the resources you needed to address risks to kids?” Stekloff asked.
“Yes,” Bejar replied. “Whenever we raised an issue at the time we were given the resources to deal with it.”
Jurors also saw video deposition testimony from Natalie Troxel, who worked as a user experience researcher at Facebook from 2017 to 2022. She said she was initially hopeful that her research would lead to positive changes to Meta’s products, but grew increasingly frustrated by how rarely recommendations were implemented. “On average, research recommendations weren't put into place,” Troxel said.
She said the culture of sharing information across teams changed after Haugen went public. “There was at least one, if not several video meetings or posts on Workplace about how — basically threatening employees that they were going to start telling us less and sharing less with us if they — if we wouldn't stop leaking,” Troxel testified.
She said the shift was frustrating because she valued the previous culture of openly sharing information.
“I had really valued openly sharing information and being able to talk with other researchers about what they were doing. It was really helpful to see other methods that researchers were using,” Troxel said. “I understood why the company was telling us not to share our research, or at least not to share it as widely, but I felt like it was going to be bad for research.”
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