Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said on Friday that a whistleblower formerly employed by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, provided “irrefutable evidence” the social media giant knowingly serves harmful content to children on its platforms.
Blackburn released a bipartisan statement with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on Friday after speaking with whistleblower Arturo Bejar, a former employee and consultant for Meta, which was then Facebook. He alleged the company willfully ignored data proving children are regularly served to content that glorifies drug use and eating disorders, and are subjected to sexual harassment and bullying on the company’s platforms.
“Arturo Bejar has courageously come forward to share new, irrefutable evidence that senior Facebook executives knowingly turned a blind eye to horrific harms to young people on the company’s platforms,” said Blackburn and Blumenthal in their statement.
The senators said Bejar’s disclosures prove Meta executives including Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri “were personally warned that millions of teens face bullying, eating disorder material, illicit drugs, and sexual exploitation, often within minutes of opening the app,” and knowingly made efforts “to hide this information from the public and Congressional oversight” after becoming aware of the content.
Bejar, who originally made his findings public through The Wall Street Journal, was originally hired by Facebook in 2009, before its public offering, but left the company in 2014 to spend time with his family. The outlet explained Bejar’s eventual return to the company in 2019 as a consultant was prompted after his daughter’s vehicle restoration posts on Facebook went viral, and the 14-year-old received a series of lewd comments and propositions from strangers.
What followed, according to Bejar, was the slow discovery that Meta’s decision to automate the enforcement of its platform rules using algorithms resulted in a significant amount of harmful content being served to children.
Though Bejar did not reference why these processes were automated after he left Facebook in 2015, the company publicly responded to pressure to impose restrictions on speech following the 2016 election of former President Donald Trump, when Russian nationals spent less than $100,000 on Facebook ads in an attempt to influence the election. The platform was also accused of failing to adequately police information prior to the January 6 protests in Washington, D.C.
Bejar was placed on a research team, which made efforts to understand how the content was slipping through the platform’s content moderation. He ultimately provided his report in an October 5 2021 letter to executives Zuckerberg, Mosseri, and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.
The whistleblower told The Wall Street Journal that Sandberg, who left the company in 2022, sympathized with the “misogyny his daughter faced” and commended his work, while Mosseri asked to meet with Bejar to discuss his findings. Zuckerberg did not respond.
However, Bejar told the outlet that his efforts were stymied by the company’s response to Frances Haugen, a whistleblower who made unrelated accusations about the company’s content moderation before U.S. Congress.
After Haugen’s public statements, the company embarked on a mission to achieve “Narrative Excellence” that required omission of any legal or moral obligation to act from any material, and Bejar claims this required him to strip the data his research team gathered from future reports and presentations. Though he had already left the company, the team Bejar worked on was later eliminated.
Highlighting Bejar’s claims, Blackburn urged her Senate colleagues to support the Kids Online Safety Act she introduced with Blumenthal.
“Our Kids Online Safety Act will finally require the company to put in place real safeguards and tools to give back control to kids and parents online,” said Blackburn in a statement. ” Facebook along with other tech giants have been fighting our legislation with armies of lobbyists, lawyers, and opposition campaigns, but the broad coalition of young people, parents, and experts will win,” she added.”
Blackburn previously told The Tennessee Star the bill already had widespread support in May, with “100s of organizations backing it” and “33 of the 100 senators in favor,” which she added was “unheard of in this day and age.”
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Georgia Star News, and also reports for The Tennessee Star and the Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
