But among the ranks of Meta’s senior middle management, Bejar and Krieger said, BEEF hit a wall. Managers who had made their careers on incrementally improving prevalence statistics weren’t receptive to the suggestion that the approach wasn’t working.
Meta disputed that the company had rejected the Well-Being Team’s approach.
“It’s absurd to suggest we only started user perception surveys in 2019 or that there’s some sort of conflict between that work and prevalence metrics,”
Meta’s Stone said, adding that the company found value in each of the approaches. “We take actions based on both and work on both continues to this day.”
Stone pointed to research indicating that teens face similar harassment and abuse offline.
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| In an email to Bejar, Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg said she recognized that the misogyny his daughter faced was withering. PHOTO: JACQUES DEMARTHON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES |
With the clock running down on his two-year consulting gig at Meta, Bejar turned to his old connections. He took the BEEF data straight to the top.
After three decades in Silicon Valley, he understood that members of the company’s C-Suite might not appreciate a damning appraisal of the safety risks young users faced from its product—especially one citing the company’s own data.
“This was the email that my entire career in tech trained me not to send,” he says. “But a part of me was still hoping they just didn’t know.”
With just weeks left at the company, Bejar emailed Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and Instagram head Adam Mosseri, blending the findings from BEEF with highly personal examples of how the company was letting down users like his own daughter.