Meta Trial Day 2: If Zuckerberg Wanted it Done, It Would Be Done

Day two of the multistate trial against Meta in federal court in Oakland, where 29 state attorneys general are asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to reach inside the company and change how Instagram and Facebook work. Arturo Bejar — former head of engineering for Facebook’s protection group, later head of well-being at Instagram — is the states’ first witness, and their strongest. He testified on direct and under cross-examination by Meta’s defense.

Bejar told the court that priorities at Meta flow from one person: “If Mark Zuckerberg wakes up and decides something is a priority, then mountains move.” He described a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude toward the millions of children under 13 on platforms where they aren’t permitted, product managers who acknowledged knowing and had no plans to act, and Instagram posts where kids stated their own ages outright. He called Meta the most sophisticated company in the world at detecting fake accounts — machine learning made that routine long before anyone called it AI — and said that if the same capability had been aimed at underage accounts, the problem could have been solved in three to six months. After reading a public letter from Zuckerberg claiming the company was succeeding at protecting kids, Bejar told the court that he concluded: “You cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids.”

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On cross, Meta’s lawyers pressed him to call his survey data “subjective.” He refused. Asking a teenager whether they were sexually harassed in the past seven days measures an experience, not an opinion — and the whole defense strategy depends on making that harm sound too squishy to count. I cover the invisible forces shaping our lives, and I’ve been in the courthouse since day one.

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