Sign up for alerts on breaking news and exclusive reporting from NPRMeta was infused with a culture in which employees obsessed over user numbers and consistently pushed safety to the side, according to Arturo Béjar, a former employee turned whistleblower, who testified today in the landmark child safety trial against the social media company.Only one man had the ability to change that, Béjar said: CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
But he didn't."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," he said.Béjar is a linchpin witness for a consortium of states led by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey that sued Meta, alleging violations of consumer and child data protection laws, and that the company lied to the public about risks its platforms posed.The attorneys for the states say Meta designed Facebook and Instagram to hook young users and to keep them on site longer thanks to features such as infinite scrolling and the "like" button.Meta has denied the allegations.
In his opening statement on Tuesday, attorney Paul Schmidt argued that the company was sensitive to the risks to teens, sought to address them and did not deceive the public about them.The state attorneys have not yet said if they will call Zuckerberg as a witness.Testifying in federal court in Oakland, California, for a second day on Wednesday, Béjar, who worked on safety issues at Meta for eight years, said he interacted with Zuckerberg dozens of times, and charged that Zuckerberg was not telling the truth when he made public denials that the company put profits over safety.In particular, Béjar addressed a widely-shared Facebook post Zuckerberg made in 2021 after another whistleblower, Frances Haugen, shared internal documents with The Wall Street Journal that highlighted risks to the mental health of teens.In the post, Zuckerb...