WASHINGTON (CN) — As legislators look to bring the hammer down on Big Tech, an industry whistleblower told the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday that social media titan Meta has refused to heed warnings that its services promulgate harmful content to minors.
Arturo Bejar, who until 2021 was a contractor at Meta-owned Facebook, made news earlier this month when the Wall Street Journal reported that he had sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg laying out what he called a “critical gap” in how the company enforced reports of harmful content on their services, which include Facebook and photo-sharing platform Instagram.
Bejar told members of the Judiciary Committee’s technology subpanel Tuesday that he thought Zuckerberg and other Meta executives would take his concerns seriously.
“Years have gone by,” he said, “and millions of teens are having their mental health compromised, and are still being traumatized by unwanted sexual advances and harmful content on Instagram and other social media platforms.”
Bejar, who had left an earlier position at Facebook in 2015, explained that when he returned to the company in 2019 as a consultant, he was shocked by what he called “a culture that was consistently ignoring what teens were experiencing.”
Thinking that Meta executives were unaware of the issue, he spent a year trying to figure out exactly how many minors were being exposed to harmful content on the company’s platforms.
“Nobody was able to answer off the top of their head,” Bejar said, until he got some answers during a conversation with Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox. Bejar was taken aback that such a high-level executive was already aware of the problem.
“I found that heartbreaking,” he said, “because it meant that they knew and that they were not acting on it.”
Based on his research, Bejar said, nearly a quarter of teens said that they have been bullied or threatened on social media, and a similar number said they had received unwanted sexual advances through those platforms. A third of children said they had seen discrimination based on race, religion or sexual orientation.
Bejar criticized Facebook for what he framed as a lackluster response to those issues. The company has rolled out what he called “placebo” safety features, based not on user experience but rather on the company’s own deliberately narrow definition of harmful content. Such actions were taken largely to placate the press and federal regulators, he reasoned.
“The company was grading its own homework,” Bejar said.
Zuckerberg never replied to Bejar’s warning, he testified. The former Facebook contractor was also unable to meet with Sheryl Sandberg, the platform's chief operating officer.
“Meta knows the harm that kids are experiencing on their platforms,” Bejar told lawmakers, "and executives know that their measures fail to address it. They are deciding time and time again not to tackle these issues.”
Committee members, many of whom have worked in bipartisan fashion over recent months to clamp down on the online exploitation of minors, renewed their commitment to pursue tighter regulations on tech companies.
“We can no longer rely on social media’s mantra, ‘trust us,’” said Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal, the subcommittee chair. “What’s needed now is legislative reform.”
Blumenthal, alongside Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn, introduced over the summer the Kids’ Online Safety Act, legislation which they say will expand options for minors to protect their personal information online and forces social media companies to be accountable for harmful content on their services.
The measure and five other similar pieces of legislation have cleared the Judiciary Committee but are stuck in a holding pattern on the Senate floor.
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, the subcommittee’s Republican ranking member, called it an “indictment” of the upper chamber that it had not yet taken up online safety legislation — and pointed to tech lobbying as a possible culprit for such inaction.
“Big Tech is the biggest, most powerful lobby in the United States Congress,” Hawley said. “They spend millions upon millions of dollars every year to lobby this body, and the truth is … they do it successfully.”
That opinion wasn’t limited to committee Republicans, though. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, chair of the Judiciary Committee, concurred, comparing the difficulty of passing legislation regulating tech companies to his fight against the tobacco industry.
“Every Democrat and Republican … we all agreed on this,” Durbin said of his fellow panel members. “Six bills passed unanimously on a bipartisan basis, which add real teeth and enforcement. I think that’s why they’ve gone nowhere. Big Tech is the big kid on the block when it comes to this issue.”
Bejar, meanwhile, urged Congress to get in gear.
“There was a time when, at home, on the weekend, a kid could escape these harms,” he said. “But today, just about every parent and grandparent has seen their kids’ faces change from happiness to grief and distress the moment that they check social media.”
As Capitol Hill deliberates, local officials across the country are taking the fight to Meta. A coalition of state governments last month sued the social media giant, arguing that Meta designed features on Facebook and Instagram to addict children and that its actions have exacerbated a teen mental health crisis.
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