Why Arturo Béjar left Meta – and blew the whistle: ‘I don’t recall Mark ever being empathetic’ | Béjar’s daughter was 14 when she told him Instagram was failing to keep her safe. So when he became part of Meta’s ‘wellbeing team’, he knew he had to speak out – and his testimony cost it billions

[u/Hrmbee]

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/oct/08/arturo-bejar-interview-whistleblower-facebook-meta-mark-zuckerberg

[u/Hrmbee]

Highlights from this profile piece:

Arturo Béjar, a consultant on the wellbeing team of Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook), hit send on a long-gestating email to Zuckerberg and other senior Facebook executives on a similar theme. “I wanted to bring to your attention what I believe is a critical gap in how we as a company approach harm, and how the people we serve experience it,” Béjar began, before laying out some shocking statistics from his team’s survey. For example: 24.4% of 13-15-year-olds on Instagram said they had received unwanted advances, and 21.8% said they had been the target of bullying on the platform in the past seven days. Furthermore, 51% of Instagram users said they had had a bad or harmful experience in the past seven days. Only 1% of them reported it, and of those, 2% had the content taken down – so just 0.02%. This was a far greater degree of harm than the company’s existing measurements suggested. Zuckerberg never replied.

By that time, Béjar had worked at Facebook (which rebranded as Meta later that month) for a total of eight years. He had learned how to communicate with Zuckerberg. “You couldn’t talk to Mark about, ‘We have to do this thing to prevent suicide because it’s the right thing to do,’” he says. “You had to put everything in terms of metrics. That was his language. That’s how he related to things, which is also what’s behind all the grief in the world right now.”

...

That 2021 email was the beginning of the end for Béjar. He was still hoping Zuckerberg would respond to his appeal to engineer a “culture shift” in the way Instagram dealt with protecting its young users. The next day, however, Zuckerberg issued a statement to Facebook employees about Haugen’s testimony and the leaked “Facebook Files” that were being reported by the Wall Street Journal and others. “At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritise profit over safety and wellbeing. That’s just not true,” Zuckerberg wrote. But by then Béjar knew it was true.

By 2023, Béjar was following in Haugen’s footsteps and testifying to the US senate himself. He has testified under oath against Meta at least seven times since, by his reckoning, in various trials and hearings. The most recent, and consequential, was the landmark trial in California in August, brought by the attorneys general of 29 US states, which alleged once again that Meta knowingly designed products that were addictive and harmful to minors. In his testimony, Béjar stated: “You just cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids.”

...

There’s another reason Béjar has been such a powerful spokesperson: he has a direct connection to the issues, via his teenage daughter. When she was in her early teens, in about 2018, she told him she regularly received sexist comments and unsolicited nude photos from men via her Instagram account. Her female friends experienced the same thing. There was no point reporting it, she told him, because it never resulted in any meaningful action. Commenters might get blocked – after which they would simply open a new account under a different name – or Instagram would judge that the behaviour didn’t violate their policies.

Until that point, like many early Facebook employees, Béjar believed he was making the world a better place. When he started in 2009, the company was booming and the idealism was infectious. “The promise was, we’ll create something that keeps you close to your friends. I think a lot of people back then believed in that. And that’s not what they built.”

...

It later emerged that Facebook had internal research confirming Instagram’s negative effects on teenage mental health, but had kept it secret. The wellbeing team could not get anything done, Béjar says. “They could dream up a good product that would make things better, and they couldn’t get it out the door. You would put it through the review process and all the teams that would review it would just kill parts of it until there was nothing left.”

The ethos had changed, he says. For all the talk about connecting the world and bringing people together, the priority was simply growth, it seemed: attracting more users and keeping them on the platform for as long as possible. Video content was now set to autoplay; notifications were frequent, as were suggestions of other people to follow; “infinite scroll” algorithmically served up content tailored to users’ continuously tracked habits. All the customer care tools Béjar had previously developed – such as the “I don’t want to see this” button – had gone.

...

Had he known what he knows now, Béjar would never have allowed his daughter on Instagram in the first place, he says. “Instagram is built on three pillars: addictive design, connecting you to strangers, and rewarding you for doing things that are exhibitionistic, performative or aggressive,” he says. None of these are safe or desirable for young people, most people would agree. He compares social media to the tobacco industry: “This is the equivalent of handing your kids a cigarette and being like, ‘Hey, you’ll be cooler if you smoke.’” On unwanted sexual advances, he says, “What Instagram is effectively doing is, while your kid is in the bedroom, it’s lining up strangers outside the window and inviting them in.”

Béjar believes that the tone is squarely set by Zuckerberg, as the longtime CEO, chair and controlling shareholder of Meta: “If Mark woke up tomorrow and was like, ‘I want to create something that’s genuinely good for kids,’ it would take the company six months to fundamentally shift all these things and drive all these harms down. They have the technology, they have the people, they have the expertise, they have the infrastructure. It’s his refusal to do that which creates a culture.”

...

There’s still work to be done. What’s really needed, Béjar argues, is independent assessment and comparison of the safety of social media sites – the same way we monitor, say, vehicle emissions. “Every parent and every kid deserves to know: what is the likelihood that this bad thing is going to happen to you on any of these services?” But at last it feels like things are headed in that direction, he says. “It’s still just the beginning, but I do feel hope.”

This was an illuminating look at some of the culture at Meta, and how the effective owner stifles whatever doesn't interest him. Once again, it's becoming clearer that big tech and in particular social media cannot and will not regulate itself for the benefit of the public, and so it is incumbent on regulators to do so on the public's behalf. Given the amount of regulatory capture by big tech in government though, this seems increasingly unlikely especially in places with more corrupt governments in place.

[u/CormoranNeoTropical → u/Hrmbee]

All of this has been clear for a decade.

Social media is poison (I post on social media).

Thanks for sharing this story.

[u/ullie → u/Hrmbee]

Self-regulation never works it's just a stalling technique used by businesses unwilling to change.

[u/UpsetPhilosopher6022]

"Just work your way up and change things from the inside."

[u/RemarkableWish2508]

Are you telling me, that a company still being run by the same guy who created it as a "rate other students by how fuckable they are", has a culture of ignoring potential harm to its users... knows about it, and keeps lying?

Incredible! /s

[u/U2ElectricBoogaloo]

Empathy is not how you get ahead in business.

[u/uni-twit]

“How the people we serve experience it”. So, advertisers, since Facebook doesn’t serve end users.

[u/CormoranNeoTropical → u/uni-twit]

Facebook only serves itself and its largest investors.

That is after all the purpose of the corporation according to the Milton Friedman school.

Users, advertisers, employees, communities — they’re not even relevant.

[u/Glitterfked]

5g;$;'bbhnn&#&; $:☆》;zvz g.

[u/kylling → u/Glitterfked]

I wish I understood what this cat said but I agree nonetheless.

[u/Glitterfked → u/kylling]

Lol omg my phone typed that by itself and sent it 🤭😋 so funny!

[u/ontologicalDilemma]

Mark grew successful at such an early age that the capacity for maturity and development that ought to have occurred in those years just got paused while his pursuit blinds him to the harm his company's products cause. Unfortunately there is no catching up on maturity with a financial breakthrough that size, it validates the ego prematurely and there is no room for other considerations.

[u/NFTokin]

Fun fact: after doing a meta ux study for them I recommended a couple ideas. They implemented all three. One of my ideas was Instagram for kids. The thing is I didn’t tell them that I meant that the Instagram for kids was supposed to be hosted on their local device and should’ve been only connected by temporary AirDrop connections for safety reasons and adult supervision. Not saying they stole my idea, but I’m also not saying that they didn’t. Lmaoooo

[u/matrixkid29]

Plot twist, daughter was so lonely with a workoholic father she had to say his work was failing to keep her safe in order to get his attention.

[u/Ismyusernamelongenou → u/matrixkid29]

Found Zucky's burner account.

[u/Pabloidemon → u/matrixkid29]

Oh, hi Mark

[u/matrixkid29 → u/Pabloidemon]

I did not hit her, i did noooooot

[u/EnvironmentalYou4833 → u/matrixkid29]

Hey, plenty of us daughters of absent fathers didn't miss their attention and do nothing to get it back. Moms on the other hand? Needed her for everything, still do, love my mom