Arturo Béjar, former engineering director at Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, said the latter social network does not do enough to protect teenagers from sexual harassment.
Béjar, who was due to testify this Tuesday before the United States Congress, assured that he believes that making this complaint implies that You will not be able to work in the technology industry again.
The former manager worked for Meta in two periods: from 2009 to 2015 and from 2019 to 2021.
Meta said it has added “more than 30 tools” to strengthen protections for teens online.
Béjar’s job, according to himself, was to help improve user protection.
Before leaving the company in 2015, I believed things were going in the right direction. But when he saw his daughter’s experience on Instagram, she realized something wasn’t right.
Speaking to the BBC, Béjar said that shortly after her 14-year-old daughter joined Instagram, began receiving “unwanted sexual advances, misogyny and harassment.”
“When we talked about this, it turned out that all of her friends were experiencing the same thing. She surprised me. She told me that she couldn’t do anything, because I had no option to report it.“.
Béjar hopes that bringing the conversation he had with his daughter to Congress can help legislators have the information they need to take the necessary measures.
“We are in an extraordinary moment in which there is consensus throughout the political arc about the urgency and need to pass laws that protect our childrento all our children,” he stated.
For Meta, it would be “easy” to implement a specific button that would allow teenagers to mark messages as sexual innuendos, according to the specialist.
“Lack of transparency”
“I can speak firsthand about how easy it is to build a button and a counter,” Béjar said.
“I think the reason they don’t do it is because there is no transparency about the damage that teenagers suffer on Instagram. And that is why I am coming forward now… it is my withdrawal from technology,” she added.
A Meta spokesperson told the BBC that several features have been created to protect teenagers online, such as implementing anonymous notifications of potentially hurtful content.
Currently, people can report Instagram messages for a number of reasons, including for containing “sexual exploitation or solicitation of sex.”
“Every day, countless people inside and outside Meta work to help keep young people safe on the Internet,” the company explained.
“Working with parents and experts, we have also introduced more than 30 tools to support teens and their families to ensure they have safe and positive experiences online.”
In 2021, Instagram introduced measures such as make accounts of users under 16 private by default and that adult users can only send messages to teenagers who follow them.
“The least we can do”
Béjar, who was responsible for Meta’s “protection and care team,” said the tools implemented by Instagram did not go far enough.
On the contrary, he considers them a “placebo for the press and regulators”.
“They are not based on the data of what people are experiencing. What you would hope to be able to ask them about this is, what percentage of teenagers received unwanted sexual advances?”
“If you enter the messages [de Instagram]I couldn’t find any option that says: this is an unwanted insinuation,” says Béjar.
According to the whistleblower, building a button that teenagers feel comfortable pressing is “the least we can do.”
Béjar says that the “report” button on Instagram it may be being used less than it should be used.
“Research we did in 2011 shows that 13-year-olds feel uncomfortable with the word reportbecause they are worried about getting themselves or someone else in trouble,” he explained.
“Imagine you’re a 13-year-old boy, and you receive an unwanted sexual advance… how uncomfortable that is, how intense that experience is, and there’s nothing you can use to say, ‘Can you help me with this, please?’ ”.
“If that button were available, there would be data on who initiates those contacts.”
Meeting with Mosseri
Béjar said that in 2021 he gathered information about it and went to “the most important people” at Meta, including Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, to discuss his concerns.
“I came away from that meeting feeling like Adam completely understood the issue, to the point where we talked about how that button would be designed,” he said.
“But I wasn’t sure they were going to perform.”
Internal statistics showed that one in eight young people between 13 and 15 years old had experienced an unwanted sexual proposal on Instagram within a week, according to Béjar.
The BBC has seen documents showing that Béjar pointed out this statistic to Mosseri.
“I felt like they had a responsibility now,” he said. “I asked Adam in an email…what should be an acceptable number or percentage of 13-15 year olds who receive an unwanted sexual proposition?
“Social media should not be a place where a child receives that kind of thing.”
Hundreds of lawsuits
Meta, and other social media companies, face lawsuits in the United States for the Impact of social networks on the mental health of adolescents.
In October, dozens of US states filed a lawsuit alleging that Meta had misled the public about the risks of social media use and contributed to a youth mental health crisis.
At the time, a Meta spokesperson said: “We are disappointed that the attorneys general have chosen this path instead of working productively with industry companies to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the apps used by teenagers. ”.
This decision came after an investigation carried out in 2021 by several state prosecutors, after whistleblower Frances Haugen declared in the United States that Meta knew that its products could harm children.
Haugen’s testimony came after a 2021 Wall Street Journal report leaked the company’s internal studies that it claimed showed teens blame Instagram for the increased levels of anxiety and depression.
Instagram posted a lengthy blog defending its research in response to the report, saying it focused “on a limited set of findings and presented them in a negative light.”
“In fact, research showed that many of the teenagers we consulted believe that using Instagram makes them helps when facing difficult times and the problems that adolescents have always faced,” stated Pratiti Raychoudhury, vice president and head of research at Meta.
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