Former Meta engineering leader to testify before Congress on Instagram’s harms to teens

On the same day whistleblower Frances Haugen was testifying before Congress about the harms of Facebook and Instagram to children in the fall of 2021, Arturo Bejar, then a contractor at the social media giant, sent an alarming email to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the same topic.

In the note, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Bejar, who worked as an engineering director at Facebook from 2009 to 2015, outlined a “critical gap” between how the company approached harm and how the people who use its products — most notably young people — experience it.

“Two weeks ago my daughter, 16, and an experimenting creator on Instagram, made a post about cars, and someone commented Get back to the kitchen.’