But that’s exactly what Arturo Béjar did in August, when describing how, as a wellbeing team consultant years earlier, he outlined the warnings he gave Zuckerberg about the harm social media sites like Instagram can have on young people.
A 2021 email he sent to Zuckerberg and other Meta officials, for example, contained stats like “51% of Instagram users say ‘yes’ to having had a bad or harmful experience in the last 7 days” and “24.4% of 13-15 year old [respondents] said they received unwanted advances.”
Zuckerberg, however, didn’t reply, a recent Guardian story explained, and instead issued a denial of the allegations — including those made in a Wall Street Journal “Facebook Files” investigation — that Meta doesn’t prioritize safety over profits.
Béjar eventually turned whistleblower, as the Guardian noted, testifying “in various trials and hearings” since 2023 against Meta including the August 2026 trial — brought by 29 state attorneys general and ending in Meta agreeing to a settlement worth up to $18 billion. And he by all accounts, has no regrets about it, as his entire reason for speaking out stemmed from a 2018 incident that hit far too close to home.
When the fight for social media safety became personal
Béjar told the Guardian that around 2018, his daughter, who was only “in her early teens,” shared that she and her friends were sent “sexist comments and unsolicited nude photos from men” on Instagram and that reporting it did nothing because the consequences for such behavior were so minimal and offenders could just open new accounts.
“Instagram is built on three pillars: addictive design, connecting you to strangers and rewarding you for doing things that are exhibitionistic, performative or aggressive,” he told the Guardian.
He added that later, when it became clear to him that Meta knew about the harm their social media platforms could cause youth and did nothing — and that any wellbeing controls he and his team tried to set up had been phased out or would be gutted before launching — he had to speak out.
The $18 billion August settlement, meanwhile, came about seven weeks before the release of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” — the sequel to the 2010 film “The Social Network” about the creation of Facebook — which dramatizes how former Facebook employee Frances Haugen turned whistleblower in 2021 and leaked the internal company documents that led to The Facebook Files.
That settlement also requires Meta to institute new safeguards, including tighter parental controls and blocking use of Facebook and Instagram for teens between midnight and 6 a.m. — though, as Reuters noted, the $18 billion “represents about three to four months of profit and about one month of revenue for Meta.”
