Bejar, a prominent whistleblower who previously testified before the U.S. Congress regarding social media harm, revealed that internal research conducted during his tenure identified "tens of thousands" of children under 13 actively using Instagram. He noted it was "common knowledge" across engineering and product development teams that underage users routinely bypassed age gates.
Despite deploying sophisticated, world-class machine-learning infrastructure to detect bot accounts and fake profiles, Meta intentionally established "no goals and no metrics" for employees to identify or age-verify accounts suspected of belonging to pre-teens.
The federal bench trial pits Meta Platforms Inc. against a coalition of states led by California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. The litigation stems from a massive multi-state lawsuit filed in 2023 accusing the tech titan of fueling a youth mental health crisis by engineering addictive features like infinite scrolling and algorithmically pushed notifications. The states also allege Meta routinely violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by harvesting personal data from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent.
During his testimony, Bejar heavily criticized safety tools publicly touted by Instagram, including the "Take a Break" feature launched in 2021. Describing the mechanism as fundamentally "designed to fail," Bejar pointed out that the feature required manual user activation and allowed teenagers to easily dismiss reminders with a single tap.
"A safety tool has to be on by default," Bejar stated, emphasizing that effective safeguards should not rely on vulnerable users opting into protection.
Meta’s legal team forcefully rejected Bejar’s characterization of corporate culture, asserting that the company remains deeply committed to youth safety and parental agency. Defense attorney Paul Schmidt countered in opening arguments that the trial would showcase Meta's ongoing investments in age-appropriate guardrails.
"You will hear over the course of this case a lot of important issues... issues like teen mental health, issues like social media, issues like how teens use social media," Schmidt told the courtroom. "Those are important issues, and they're issues where Meta believes that it has a responsibility to act on its own... and try to work with teens and parents in partnership."
Presided over by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, the trial is slated to run for six weeks. Jurors will issue an advisory verdict before Judge Gonzalez Rogers determines potential liability, structural remedies, and civil penalties that could reach billions of dollars.
