Arturo Béjar, former engineering leader, said he saw firsthand that social media giant was not protecting his child from harassment
Arturo Béjar told Congress that he saw firsthand how the social media giant was not protecting his child from harassmentto children in the fall of 2021, a former engineering director at the social media giant who had rejoined the company as a consultant sent an alarming email to Mark Zuckerberg about the same topic.CEO of his own daughter’s troubling experiences with Instagram. But he said his concerns and warnings went unheeded.
“Two weeks ago my daughter, 16, and an experimenting creator on Instagram, made a post about cars, and someone commented ‘Get back to the kitchen.’ It was deeply upsetting to her,” he wrote. “At the same time the comment is far from being policy violating, and our tools of blocking or deleting mean that this person will go to other profiles and continue to spread misogyny. I don’t think policy/reporting or having more content review are the solutions.
“I can safely say that Meta’s executives knew the harm that teenagers were experiencing, that there were things that they could do that are very doable and that they chose not to do them,” Béjar told the Associated Press . This, he said, makes it clear that “we can’t trust them with our children”. Béjar pointed to user surveys carefully crafted by the company that show, for instance, that 13% of Instagram users – ages 13 to 15 – reported having received unwanted sexual advances on the platform in the previous seven days.
Meta, in a statement, said: “Every day countless people inside and outside of Meta are working on how to help keep young people safe online. The issues raised here regarding user perception surveys highlight one part of this effort, and surveys like these have led us to create features like anonymous notifications of potentially hurtful content and comment warnings.