Zuckerberg put growth over child safety, ex-engineer testifies

A former engineering director at Meta Platforms testified on Wednesday, August 19, that CEO Mark Zuckerberg prioritized company growth and user engagement over the safety of children on Facebook and Instagram. The testimony came during a landmark federal trial in Oakland, California, in which a coalition of states accuses the social media giant of designing addictive platforms that harm young users and illegally collecting their data.

Arturo Bejar, Meta’s first witness in the case, described a corporate culture where product changes, including those related to safety, occurred only if Zuckerberg directly ordered them. “If Mark makes something a priority, mountains move in months,” Bejar told the jury, according to reports from the courtroom. He stated that under Zuckerberg’s leadership, safety was consistently treated as a secondary concern to metrics like daily active users and meaningful social interactions. Bejar, who worked at Meta from 2009 to 2015 and as an outside contractor on Instagram’s wellbeing team from 2019 to 2021, said this approach left critical safety features ineffective.

He specifically criticized a “Take a Break” tool designed to encourage users to stop...