His Job Was to Make Instagram Safe for Teens. His 14-Year-Old Showed Him What the App Was Really Like.

In the fall of 2021 a consultant named Arturo Bejar sent Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg an unusual note.

“I wanted to bring to your attention what l believe is a critical gap in how we as a company approach harm, and how the people we serve experience it,” he began. Though 

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 regularly issued public reports suggesting that it was largely on top of safety issues on its platforms, he wrote, the company was deluding itself.

The experience of young users on Meta’s Instagram—where Bejar had spent the previous two years working as a consultant—was especially acute. In a subsequent email to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, one statistic stood out: One in eight users under the age of 16 said they had experienced unwanted sexual advances on the platform over the previous seven days.

For Bejar, that finding was hardly a surprise. His daughter and her friends had been receiving unsolicited penis pictures and other forms of harassment on the platform since the age of 14, he wrote, and Meta’s systems generally ignored their reports—or responded by saying that the harassment didn’t violate platform rules.

“I asked her why boys keep doing that,” Bejar wrote to Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants. “She said if the only thing that happens is they get blocked, why wouldn’t they?”

For the well-being of its users, Bejar argued, Meta needed to change course, focusing less on a flawed system of rules-based policing and more on addressing such bad experiences. The company would need to collect data on what upset users and then work to combat the source of it, nudging those who made others uncomfortable to improve their behavior and isolating communities of users who deliberately sought to harm others.