Posting the watered down Well-Being research was Bejar’s final act at the company. He left at the end of October 2021, just days after Zuckerberg renamed the company Meta Platforms.
Bejar left dispirited, but chose not to go public with his concerns—his Well-Being Team colleagues were still trying to push ahead, and the last thing they needed was to deal with the fallout from another whistleblower, he told the Journal at the time.
The hope that the team’s work would continue didn’t last. The company stopped conducting the specific survey behind BEEF, then laid off most everyone who’d worked on it as part of what Zuckerberg called Meta’s “year of efficiency.”
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| A smartphone with Facebook's logo is seen in front of displayed Facebook's new rebrand logo Meta in this illustration taken Oct. 28, 2021. |
If Meta was to change, Bejar told the Journal, the effort would have to come from the outside. He began consulting with a coalition of state attorneys general who filed suit against the company late last month, alleging that the company had built its products to maximize engagement at the expense of young users’ physical and mental health. Bejar also got in touch with members of Congress about where he believes the company’s user-safety efforts fell short.
He’s scheduled to testify in front of a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday.
Adapted from “Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets” by Jeff Horwitz, to be published on Nov. 14, 2023, by Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Jeff Horwitz.
Write to Jeff Horwitz at jeff.horwitz@wsj.com