On Tuesday, Arturo Bejar, a second Meta whistleblower, testified before a Senate subcommittee. Bejar recounted his struggles to alert the company's top executives to the potential damage their platforms could cause to adolescents, echoing the actions of former Meta staffer Frances Haugen, who exposed internal reports and information to the press and the Senate.
On Tuesday, a second Meta whistleblower testified before a Senate subcommittee, telling legislators about his failure to draw the attention of company executives to the detrimental effects their platforms were having on young people. Arturo Bejar, a former Facebook engineering director from 2009 to 2015 and a consultant at Instagram from 2019 to 2021, addressed the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and Law, detailing the lack of action taken by key Meta personnel.The discussion also centred around tech lobbying leading to Congress' inability to approve legislation that would safeguard kids on the web. Numerous Senate committees have backed bills with the goal of protecting minors on the internet, but have yet to take any action on their proposals.Bejar's testimony illustrates the helplessness of legislators confronted with technology companies' significant power.
Bejar recently revealed his allegations against the company in a Wall Street Journal interview. He follows in the footsteps of Frances Haugen, another former Meta employee who was the first whistleblower to leak internal documents and research to news organizations and the Senate to expose the company's safety issues.During Tuesday's hearing before lawmakers, Bejar testified that he had a conversation with Chief Product Officer Chris Cox in which he discussed research into platform harms to teens. Bejar claimed that Cox acknowledged that he was already aware of the statistics.He said his "heart sunk" when he realized Meta leadership knew about the harm inflicted on younger users, but was not taking appropriate action. Bejar also criticized Meta for having a "very narrow definition of harm" and not dedicating enough resources to understanding the different types of harms to different demographic groups.On the day of Haugen's Senate testimony on October 5, 2021, Bejar emailed Meta leadership – including Mark Zuckerberg, then-COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri – informing them of the research into the harms of the platform.He provided Mosseri with an outline of his points prior to a scheduled meeting the following day, highlighting a survey of 13-15-year-olds on Instagram in which 13% of respondents had received unwanted sexual advances in the last week, 26% had seen discrimination based on various identities, and 21% felt worse about themselves due to posts of others.Bejar shared in the email that his teenage daughter had been sent unsolicited genitalia pictures by male users since she was 14, and why this kept happening – because the only consequence was being blocked by her.He argued for Meta to provide funding to better understand the content responsible for bad experiences, what percent of this content breaks policy, and possible product changes to improve the platform.Despite this plea, Bejar stated he has never gotten a response from or met with Zuckerberg or Sandberg.In response to Bejar's claims, a Meta spokesperson said that "Every day countless people inside and outside of Meta are working on how to help keep young people safe online.” He pointed to the development of features such as ‘anonymous notifications of potentially hurtful content’ and ‘comment warnings’, as well as tools such as ‘Restrict’ which blocks users who send inappropriate photos, and Content Distribution Guidelines designed to address borderline content.
Subcommittee Chair Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, promoted their legislation, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), as a response to the harms Bejar described. The bill seeks to increase tech companies' responsibility for safely designing their products for kids.Blumenthal told reporters, "The time has come for the Congress to provide protection tools that parents and kids can use to disconnect from those algorithms, those black boxes that drive the toxic content." He addressed worries from some progressive groups that the bill might negatively affect vulnerable children, including LGBTQ youth, noting that they had revamped the bill to address those concerns.He explained, "This measure is not about content or censorship. It is about the product design that drives that toxic content at kids. We're not trying to come between kids and what they want to see, but simply enable them to disconnect from algorithms when it drives content that they don't want."Though some fear that narrowly-focused legislation will stymie Congress's efforts to pass broader privacy measures, Blumenthal asserted, "We've reached a consensus now that we need to do the possible rather than aim for the ideal. I'm all in favor of a broader privacy bill, but let's take it one step at a time, and the more bipartisan consensus we have on protecting children, the better positioned we'll be to do a broader privacy bill."Subcommittee Ranking Member Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, stated, "It is an indictment of this body, to be honest with you, that we have not acted. And we all know the reason why. Big Tech is the biggest, most powerful lobby in the United States Congress … They successfully shut down every meaningful piece of legislation."Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, chastised the chamber for neglecting proposed bills intended to protect child safety online despite the fact that they had been approved at the committee level with strong support.Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, attributed tech firms' lobbying practices to Section 230, tech's legal liability shield. "The other bills are going nowhere until they believe they can be sued in court," he said.
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