The Meta child safety trial that opened in Oakland, California this week has already produced testimony that will be difficult for the company to talk its way around. Arturo Béjar, a former engineering director at Meta, told the jury that the company operated a deliberate “don’t ask, don’t tell” strategy on child safety, and that Mark Zuckerberg knew about it.
Béjar is not a disgruntled ex-employee who turned hostile at the exit interview. He worked at Meta (then Facebook) from 2009 to 2015, returned as an independent contractor examining teen wellbeing on Instagram from 2019 to 2021, and by his own testimony spent years trying to fix problems from the inside. He estimated he briefed Zuckerberg at least 100 times. He sent the CEO a direct email in 2021, warning of constant reports of harmful content and damage to teenage wellbeing on Facebook and Instagram, after Zuckerberg publicly claimed the company did not prioritise profit over safety.
Zuckerberg never replied.
“I felt that he created a false and misleading impression of Facebook’s commitment to young people,” Béjar testified. His explanation for going directly to the CEO was characteristically blunt: “In my experience, when Mark makes something a priority, mountains move.” In this case, nothing moved.
What Béjar’s Data on the Meta Child Safety Trial Actually Shows
Béjar’s motivations were personal before they were professional. His own teenage daughter received unwanted sexual advances and images on Instagram, and when she tried to report the abuse through the platform’s established processes, she found them either ineffective or inaccessible.
He began conducting surveys. His research found that 51% of teen users reported having had bad or harmful experiences in the previous seven days. Of that group, the offending content was removed only 0.02% of the time.
A separate internal survey, conducted between 27 June and 8 July 2021 and analysed by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, found that 30.3% of users had seen misinformation, 25.3% had witnessed hate, 11.9% had received unwanted sexual advances, and 6.7% had been exposed to self-harm content, all within a seven-day window. Béjar sent those findings directly to Zuckerberg and Instagram’s chief executive Adam Mosseri.
Meta’s position, presented by attorney Paul Schmidt in opening statements, is that the company did not allow children under 13 to register accounts and had disabled more than 1 million accounts of underage users. There was “no dispute” people could struggle with social media, Schmidt said, but Meta had built tools to address it. Whether those tools amount to good-faith effort or cosmetic cover is precisely what the jury must decide.
A Pattern of Warnings Ignored, Now Before 29 State Attorneys General
This is not Béjar’s first time making these arguments in public. He testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and Law on 7 November 2023, where Subcommittee Chair Richard Blumenthal introduced him as an engineer hired specifically to prevent harms to children, whose recommendations were ignored. At that hearing, Béjar opened with: ‘I appear before you today as a dad with firsthand experience of a child who received unwanted sexual advances on Instagram.’
At the current trial, NPR reports that Béjar went further: ‘At the end of the day, it was the company culture that Mark had created that made it so that it was practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the wellbeing and safety issues that we’ve been talking about.’
That is a precise and prosecutable claim. It moves from “we tried and failed” to “the structure itself was the obstacle.”
The case is brought by 29 US state attorneys general, co-led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and including New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport. Their demands go well beyond compensation. According to CNBC, the states are seeking permanent injunctive relief on a nationwide basis for any violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and want Meta to delete all personal data collected from children under 13 as well as the algorithms and models trained on it. They are also demanding, per BBC News, that Meta eliminate ‘like’ counts and infinite scroll on both Instagram and Facebook.
If damages are awarded, they could reach as high as $200 billion, roughly equivalent to Meta’s 2025 annual revenue of $201 billion. The trial is expected to last at least six weeks.
Since reporting began on the proceedings, AP and NPR have both reported that Meta and the states reached a settlement: AP reports the figure as $18 billion, while NPR reports $17 billion; the two wire services conflict on the figure. AP describes the sum as a fraction of Meta’s annual revenue, which context cuts both ways: it is an enormous number in absolute terms, and a manageable one for a company of Meta’s scale.
Meta’s cross-examination of Béjar made the most of his own admissions: that he retained a good relationship with the company, that he did not leave on bad terms, and that he remained proud of his work there. To each question, he answered yes. That does not undermine his testimony. People can believe in an institution’s potential, work loyally inside it, and still be right that leadership chose growth over their children’s safety. The jury will have to decide which version of Meta they are looking at.
