Meta’s child-safety strategy is now under scrutiny from two competing accounts: the company says it recognized the risks and developed safeguards, while a former engineer says executives knew the protections were failing and chose not to act decisively.

Arturo Béjar, a former Meta safety engineer, told a federal jury that the company adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to children’s safety. The conservative account of his testimony similarly emphasizes Instagram’s handling of users under 13, framing the case around whether the platform knowingly failed to confront underage use.¹

The states suing Meta argue that the problem was structural, not accidental. They allege the company designed products to be addictive, exposed young people to harmful material and collected data from children under 13 without parental permission. California deputy attorney general Megan O’Neill told jurors that child welfare was “a shared responsibility” but that “Meta didn’t do its share.”²

Béjar’s testimony supplied the sharpest contrast with Meta’s public defense. He said he briefed Mark Zuckerberg roughly 100 times and sent the chief executive a 2021 warning about harmful content and damage to teenagers’ wellbeing. Zuckerberg, he testified, never responded. Béjar also said that 51% of surveyed teenagers reported a harmful experience in the previous week, while the material was removed only 0.02% of the time.³

Meta does not dispute that social media can cause problems, but it rejects the states’ broader interpretation. Its attorney, Paul Schmidt, said the company had “come up with tools to try and address that,” barred children under 13 from registering and disabled more than 1 million accounts belonging to underage users.⁴

The central dispute is therefore not whether risks exist, but whether Meta’s safeguards were a meaningful response or a thin barrier around a business model powered by engagement. Béjar put that tension plainly: “The more views you have, the more ads you sell, the more revenue you make.”⁵