Meta has been sued by California and a coalition of states that accuse it of intentionally designing products to hook kids and teens.
Arturo Bejar, a former Meta staffer and whistleblower, testified in court in Oakland, California, on Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026. The company has acknowledged that it has a role to play in addressing teen well-being, and that some teens struggle to manage their time on social media, but says that it acts on those issues. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)
Mark Zuckerberg created a company culture that made it “practically impossible” to address safety and well-being issues in its products, Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar said in a federal courtroom in Oakland on Wednesday during the landmark child safety trial against the tech company.
The former Meta safety engineer said that features the company built to support mental health and counter social media addiction were “designed to fail.”
“It’s like [if] you have a car and they give you some brakes, but the brakes are in the trunk,” he said. “You have to go look for it and install it before you turn it on.”
Béjar was the first witness called by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, who allege that the largest social media company in the world knowingly designed its products in ways that could harm children.
Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, has denied the allegations.
The company has acknowledged that it has a role to play in addressing teen well-being, and that some teens struggle to manage their time on social media, but said that it acts on those issues.
He pointed specifically to “Quiet Mode,” which pauses notifications and sets an account’s status as “away,” and a “Take a Break” button, a full-screen pop-up that gives users a nudge to close the app after a certain amount of continuous scrolling time.
Both are optional and user-initiated. They can also be ignored.
“If ‘Take a Break’ was designed to be effective, it would have been designed and measured by how effective it was to getting people to stop using the product,” Béjar said.
Under cross-examination, Meta attorney Brian Stekloff got Béjar to affirm his belief that there are benefits to social media, including for teens.
Béjar said that Meta hired highly educated and well-qualified people to work on safety, many of whom remained at the company after he left, and that during his first, full-time role, Zuckerberg and other executives would work to correct issues when they found them. Both times he departed the company were on good terms, Béjar said.
But the company hid evidence of the psychological harm it caused children behind euphemistic language and misleading metrics, Béjar said.
“It was the company culture that made it near impossible to deliver things that would have been invaluable to learn about harm so that you could reduce it,” Béjar said, adding that he “tried to do it the first year” he returned as a consultant.
He said that when Meta was accused of harming children, it responded with data showing that more kids benefited.
“If we make, out of 100 kids, 31 kids less anxious and 30 kids more anxious … [that to Meta is] more good than harm,” he said. “It’s like math with harm.
“The work should be to protect the good … while bringing the harm as close to zero as possible,” Béjar said.
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