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I am appealing to you because I believe that working this way will require a culture shift,” Bejar wrote to Zuckerberg—
the company would have to acknowledge that its existing approach to governing Facebook and Instagram wasn’t working. But Bejar declared himself optimistic that Meta was up to the task: “I know that everyone in m-team team deeply cares about the people we serve,”
he wrote, using Meta’s internal shorthand for Zuckerberg and his top deputies.
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| Arturo Bejar left Facebook in 2015 for personal reasons and returned four years later as a consultant on user-safety issues. PHOTO: IAN BATES FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL |
Two years later, the problems Bejar identified remain unresolved, and new blind spots have emerged. The company launched a sizable child-safety task force in June, following revelations that Instagram was cultivating connections among large-scale networks of pedophilic users, an issue the company says it’s working to address.
This account is based on internal Meta documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, as well as interviews with Bejar and current and former employees who worked with him during his stint at the company as a consultant. Meta owns Facebook and Instagram.