OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) — A Meta insider continued his testimony Wednesday in the landmark trial in which four states claim the tech giant chose profits over teen safety and knowingly misled the public about supposed addictive features of its social media platforms, resulting in negative impacts to the mental health of young users.
During direct questioning by Colorado’s chief trial counsel, Jason Slothouber, former Meta engineer Arturo Bejar told the eight-person jury about certain design features on Facebook and Instagram that were choices by the company to either keep teens on the platforms longer or were futile attempts to set up safeguards around what Bejar called “compulsive use.”
“If you were designing for safety, you would not show popularity counters,” he said about features such as “likes,” follows and profile views that show up on a user’s posts, saying they are “reward mechanisms that were designed for adults and are inherently unsafe for teenagers” because of a teen’s vulnerability during a developmental time when peer pressure encourages teens to compete.
Additionally, Bejar said other features, such as infinite scroll, were designed to keep users on the platforms for long periods with no “natural end” to seeing content because Meta prioritized, he said, targeting ads to increase its profits.
Bejar also mentioned the autoplay feature for videos and how it harms young users because they aren’t given a choice about whether to watch the video.
While Meta amped up design choices to keep more teens on the apps longer, Bejar said the company intentionally hid safety tools that would establish boundaries. For a teen to pause notifications — a buzz or ding every time a user receives a message or update — they would need to navigate through “10 different screens and 50 toggle buttons,” an effort, Bejar noted, most users won’t accomplish.
Furthermore, when Meta introduced a safety tool called “take a break,” where a reminder popped up on the screen after a certain amount of time, Bejar said it was “designed to fail.” It failed, he said, because it was a setting most people don’t take the time to change, and it was a “snoozeable” message that could be easily dismissed without affecting real change.
He said an effective safety tool would be on by default, comparing “take a break” to having to “turn on an airbag every time you get in the car.”
The second day of the blockbuster trial in Chief U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ courtroom — the first in the multidistrict litigation of more than 3,000 active cases — pitted the parent company of Facebook and Instagram against California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey. Another 25 states that sued Meta in 2023 will head to trial later.
The states claim Meta violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law requiring online companies to obtain verifiable parental consent for users under 13. Additionally, the lead states claim Meta leadership made deceptive statements about its platforms that likely misled the public and violated consumer protection laws.
An 8-person jury is hearing the case, but its verdict will be advisory. Rogers will decide the case, which is expected to last about six weeks. If Meta is found liable, penalties could reach up to $200 billion and change how Meta handles teen accounts.
During cross-examination, Meta attorney Brian Stekloff, a partner at Wilkinson Stekloff, asked Bejar whether, while working as a Meta engineer focused on youth safety and underage accounts, he ever got the harms teens experienced down to zero.
Bejar answered no, saying “reducing harm is a commitment to minimize.”
“It’s not an equation that you solve that you get to zero,” he said.
Stekloff repeatedly asked Bejar about some of the “highly qualified” Meta employees that continue to work on youth safety after Bejar left his engineer role in 2015.
Bejar was hired again from 2019 to 2021 as an unpaid independent contractor, focusing on youth safety on Instagram.
Stekloff asked Bejar if Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was supportive of Bejar’s work. Bejar answered that during his time as an engineer, he felt supported and well-resourced, yet by 2021, he didn’t believe Zuckerberg’s public statements that Meta’s “products were designed with mental health and well-being in mind” and that “every negative experience matters.”
“It’s so false, every part of it,” said Bejar.
In an Oct. 5, 2021, email to Zuckerberg, Bejar made clear his concerns.
“I believe there is a critical gap in how we as a company approach harm and how the people we serve experience it,” he wrote. He testified that Zuckerberg never responded.
Before testimony Wednesday, Rogers admonished attorneys on both sides about trial protocol.
“On both sides, you need to get over trying to micromanage the other side’s presentation,” the Barack Obama appointee said with a raised voice.
Rogers gave her broad understanding of what the trial is about.
She said it wasn’t about the content on Facebook and Instagram, noting the federal shield of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which says Meta isn’t liable for what its users post.
“The point of this trial is that Meta allegedly lied and misrepresented that the features are addictive,” she said. “If Meta said nothing, we wouldn’t be here. The dispute is that they said they were not addictive. That is the dispute, and if the Ninth Circuit disagrees with me on this, we will be back here in three years.”
The trial continues Thursday with more testimony from the states’ expert witness, San Diego State University psychology researcher Jean Twenge.
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