In his remaining few weeks, Bejar worked on two final projects: drafting a version of the Well-Being Team’s work for wider distribution inside Meta and preparing for a half-hour meeting with Mosseri.
As Bejar recalls it, the Mosseri talk went well. Though there would always be things to improve, Bejar recalled Mosseri saying, the Instagram chief acknowledged the problem Bejar described, and said he was enthusiastic about creating a way for users to report unwelcome contacts rather than simply blocking them.
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| Bejar emailed his user-safety findings to Zuckerberg and other executives the same day former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testified on Capitol Hill, alleging that it was covering up risks the company knew about. PHOTO: AL DRAGO/BLOOMBERG NEWS |
“Adam got it,” Bejar said.
But Bejar’s efforts to share the Well-Being Team’s data and conclusions beyond the company’s executive ranks hit a snag. After Haugen’s airing of internal research, Meta had cracked down on the distribution of anything that would, if leaked, cause further reputational damage. With executives privately asserting that the company’s research division harbored a fifth column of detractors, Meta was formalizing a raft of new rules for employees’ internal communication. Among the mandates for achieving
“Narrative Excellence,”
as the company called it, was to keep research data tight and never assert a moral or legal duty to fix a problem.
After weeks of haggling with Meta’s communications and legal staff, Bejar secured permission to internally post a sanitized version of what he’d sent Zuckerberg and his lieutenants. The price was that he omit all of the Well-Being Team’s survey data.
“I had to write about it as a hypothetical,”
Bejar said. Rather than acknowledging that Instagram’s survey data showed that teens regularly faced unwanted sexual advances, the memo merely suggested how Instagram might help teens if they faced such a problem.