Arturo Bejar, former Facebook employee and consultant for Instagram, is sworn in during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law hearing to examine social media and the teen mental health crisis, Nov. 7, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
n the same day whistleblower Frances Haugen was testifying before Congress about the harms of Facebook and Instagram to children in the fall of 2021, Arturo Béjar, then a contractor at the social media giant, sent an alarming email to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the same topic.
Béjar believes that Meta needs to change how it polices its platforms, with a focus on addressing harassment, unwanted sexual advances and other bad experiences even if these problems don't clearly violate existing policies. For instance, sending vulgar sexual messages to children doesn't necessarily break Instagram's rules, but Béjar said teens should have a way to tell the platform they don't want to receive these types of messages.
“What you have brought to this committee today is something every parent needs to hear,” added Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, the panel's ranking Republican. “You heard the company talk about it ‘oh this is really complicated,'” Béjar told the AP. “No, it isn’t. Just give the teen a chance to say ‘this content is not for me’ and then use that information to train all of the other systems and get feedback that makes it better.”
In 2022, Meta also introduced “kindness reminders” that tell users to be respectful in their direct messages — but it only applies to users who are sending message requests to a creator, not a regular user.
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