Asked for comment for this article, Meta disputed Bejar’s assertion that it paid too little attention to user experience and failed to sufficiently act on the findings of its Well-Being Team. During and after Bejar’s time as a consultant, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said, the company has rolled out several product features meant to address some of the Well-Being Team’s findings.
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| Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s name to Meta Platforms in October 2021, days before Bejar’s two-year consulting gig ended. PHOTO: CONSTANZA HEVIA H. FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL |
Those features include warnings to users before they post comments that Meta’s automated systems flag as potentially offensive, and reminders to be kind when sending direct messages to users like content creators who receive a large volume of messages.
For a consultant, Bejar had unusually deep roots at the company. He had first been hired as a Facebook engineering director in 2009. Responsible for protecting the platform’s users, he’d initially viewed the task as traditional security work, building tools to detect hacking attempts, fight fraud rings and remove banned content.
Monitoring the posts of what was then Facebook’s 300 million-odd users wasn’t as simple as enforcing rules. There was too much interaction on Facebook to police it all, and what upset users was often subjective.
Bejar loved the work, only leaving Facebook in 2015 because he was getting divorced and wanted to spend more time with his children. Having joined the company long before its initial public offering, he had the resources to spend the next few years on hobbies—including restoring vintage cars with his 14-year-old daughter, who documented her new pastime on Instagram.
That’s when the trouble began. A girl restoring old cars drew plenty of good attention on the platform—and some real creeps, such as the guy who told her that the only reason people watched her videos was “because you’ve got tits.”