‘Safety was an afterthought’: Ex-Meta engineer accuses Instagram of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach on kids

CALIFORNIA: A former Meta engineering director on Wednesday (local time) accused Instagram of taking a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach toward children under 13 on its platform, alleging that safety was treated as secondary to user engagement and profits, ABC News reported.

According to ABC News, Arturo Bejar, who has previously testified before the US Congress about child safety on Instagram, made the remarks during his second day of testimony in a landmark trial against Meta in federal court in Oakland, California. “The attitude in particular on Instagram was ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’,” Bejar said when asked about the company’s approach towards users under 13 years of age.

Bejar said Meta prioritised how frequently and how long users engaged with its products, even when such engagement could be detrimental to their mental well-being. “If you step away from the product, they are not going to make any money,” he said.

He said that employee performance reviews and compensation for those working on user-facing products were largely based on metrics such as the number of users and the amount of time they spent using the products. “In that context, safety was an afterthought”, he said.

Former Meta safety executive Arturo Béjar testified that the company ignored internal warnings about risks to children on Instagram.

Béjar, who previously worked on Facebook’s safety efforts, told the court: “You just cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids.”

He says that he… pic.twitter.com/epT7EkPF1f

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The trial, which began on Tuesday (local time), pits Meta against California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. The states are among 29 that sued the tech giant in 2023, accusing it of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features that encouraged children to become addicted to its platforms.

The lawsuit also alleges that Meta routinely collected data from children under 13 without parental consent, in violation of federal law. Meta has rejected the allegations and said evidence presented during the trial will demonstrate its commitment to safety.

“You will hear over the course of this case a lot of important issues, issues like teen mental health, issues like social media, issues like how teens use social media”, Meta lawyer Paul Schmidt said on August 17, as cited by ABC News.

“Those are important issues, and they’re issues where Meta believes that it has a responsibility. It has a responsibility to act on its own. It has a responsibility to try to work with teens and parents in partnership to try to address those questions,” he said.

According to ABC News, Bejar found “tens of thousands” of children under 13 on Instagram through his research and said it was “common knowledge” within the company that such young children were using the platform. “Meta has one of the most sophisticated infrastructures in the world to detect fake accounts,” he said, adding that there were “no goals, no metrics” to detect and check the ages of children suspected to be under 13.

Bejar also criticised Meta’s ‘Take a Break’ feature, introduced in 2021, calling it a tool that was ‘designed to fail’. He said users had to activate the setting themselves and could easily dismiss it. “A safety tool has to be on by default”, he said.

The states are seeking changes to the user experience on Facebook and Instagram as well as financial damages, which could include billions of dollars in penalties. ABC News said the trial is expected to last about six weeks.

According to the news platform, Bejar worked at Facebook from 2009 to 2015 and is known for his work to combat cyberbullying. He returned from 2019 to 2021 as a contractor to work on safety issues. He testified before Congress in 2023 about social media and the teen mental health crisis, saying that Meta executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, knew about harms Instagram was causing but chose not to make meaningful changes to address them. (ANI)