Former Meta safety engineer testifies in Santa Fe trial

A former Meta engineer testified Tuesday in New Mexico's civil trial against his former employer that the culture of the company became more focused on growth at the expense of safety after 2019 in response to heated competition with TikTok.

Arturo Béjar, who headed a user-safety team at Meta from 2009 to 2015, told jurors that product safety had become a secondary concern when he returned to the company as a safety consultant for Instagram from 2019 to 2021.

By 2019, the culture at Meta had become one of "see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil, where it was hard to have honest, thorough, data-driven conversations about safety," Béjar testified. The word "addiction" had become "a dirty word," he said.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2023 alleging the parent company of Facebook and Instagram failed to protect children from sexual abuse, online solicitation and human trafficking.

Tuesday marked the second day of trial in 1st Judicial District Court in Santa Fe before Judge Bryan Biedscheid. Béjar is expected to continue testifying Wednesday under questioning from Meta attorneys.

A spokesman for Meta responded Tuesday that any suggestion that the company prioritizes growth over safety is "simply not true." Meta has designed safety tools and resources to support parents and teens and launched Teen Accounts, which automatically place teens into private accounts with the strictest message settings, the spokesman said.

Meta was developing its Facebook Reels video-sharing platform by 2019 and company staff was "all hands on deck" developing products to compete with TikTok, Béjar said. Facebook and Instagram were focused on increasing user engagement and feeding large amounts of content to users who had little opportunity to report objectionable material, he said.

"Meta is devastatingly good at recommending other things," he said. "If your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls."

Béjar spoke about the experience of his daughter, who created an Instagram account at age 14 and posted videos of herself with cars that quickly attracted 100,000 views. Many of the comments were from men who made comments about her body, made sexual advances and asked her to sell nude photos, he said.

"I didn't know that (her Instagram account) was going to bring predators to her door," Béjar said. “When a girl posts a dance video or something, it’s not their intention to reach men that have pedophile interests, but that’s what the algorithm does."