Meta faces its most consequential legal challenge as a former engineer alleges the company knew its platform design could harm young users and prioritised keeping them online
The second day of the landmark trial against Meta was dominated by testimony from Arturo Béjar, a former Facebook engineer who told the court that the technology company placed greater emphasis on increasing the time users spent on its platforms than on preventing harm to young people.
Béjar is the first witness to take the stand in the case brought by four US states — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey — against Meta, the technology group founded and led by Mark Zuckerberg. Prosecutors accuse the owner of Facebook and Instagram of designing its platforms to foster addiction among young people, misleading the public about their safety and collecting data from children under 13.
Béjar worked at Facebook in two periods between 2009 and 2015, leaving the Menlo Park, California-based company after raising concerns about strategies designed to attract and retain adolescent users. He returned in 2019 as an independent adviser on wellbeing, but remained for only two years after concluding that the company was not acting on his recommendations.
During his testimony, Béjar said he repeatedly informed company officials about harm he believed the application was causing “due to the way it was designed”. He told the court that changes to content moderation were not what was required. Instead, he argued, the company needed to alter the design of its products to prevent harm from occurring in the first place and to help users learn how to use the platforms safely.
He described mechanisms that he said were created to encourage users to return to the service and remain there for longer. These included different types of notifications, such as birthday alerts for contacts, as well as short-form videos designed to capture attention and learn users’ preferences.
The central issue in the trial is therefore not simply what content appears on social media, but how the platforms themselves are designed. That distinction gives the case a wider significance, with comparisons drawn in the source material to the legal battles involving major tobacco companies in the 1990s, when the addictive nature of their products became a central issue.
Béjar also attributed the company’s priorities to Zuckerberg’s approach to decision-making. He testified that Zuckerberg became deeply involved in different areas of the business and directed employees on what to prioritise. According to Béjar, the company’s decisions reflected Zuckerberg’s focus on finding ways to increase the amount of time users remained on the social network.
Béjar said he became particularly concerned after his teenage daughter received an unwanted sexual message on Instagram and had no way to report it. “Los jóvenes estaban sufriendo daños a un ritmo extraordinariamente alto,” he told the court, adding: “Cualquier padre habría querido saber”.
He also described Meta’s monitoring processes as defective, claiming that the company failed to pay sufficient attention to harm experienced by young users. Béjar said that “la mitad de las personas que usan Instagram han dicho que han tenido una experiencia perjudicial en los últimos siete días”.
The financial stakes are enormous. Although there is no official demand, state officials estimate that compensation could reach 200.000 millones de dólares. Meta estimates that potential indemnities could reach 1,4 billones de dólares, almost equivalent to the group’s current stock-market value.
Meta rejected Béjar’s allegations during the second day of proceedings. The company argued that social media platforms are protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression, and by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which establishes that social media companies are not responsible for content posted on their platforms.
The trial is expected to last between six and eight weeks, placing the design and business priorities of one of the world’s largest technology companies under sustained legal scrutiny.
