His Job Was to Make Instagram Safe for Teens. His 14-Year-Old Showed Him What the App Was Really Like.

“Policy enforcement is analogous to the police,”

 he wrote in the email Oct. 5, 2021—arguing that it’s essential to respond to crime, but that it’s not what makes a community safe. Meta had an opportunity to do right by its users and take on a problem that Bejar believed was almost certainly industrywide.

The timing of Bejar’s note was unfortunate. He sent it the same day of the first congressional hearing featuring Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who alleged that the company was covering up internally understood ways that its products could harm the health of users and undermine public discourse.

 Her allegations and internal documents she took from Meta formed the basis of the Journal’s Facebook Files series. 

Zuckerberg had offered a public rebuttal, declaring that

“the claims don’t make any sense”

 and that both Haugen and the Journal had mischaracterized the company’s research into how Instagram could under some circumstances corrode the self esteem of teenage girls. 

Instagram head Adam Mosseri, Bejar said, acknowledged the problem Bejar described. PHOTO: TOM WILLIAMS/ZUMA PRESS

In response to Bejar’s email, Sandberg sent a note to Bejar only, not the other executives. As he recalls it, she said Bejar’s work demonstrated his commitment to both the company and his users. On a personal level, the author of the hit feminist book

“Lean In”

 wrote, she recognized that the misogyny his daughter faced was withering.

Mosseri wrote back on behalf of the group, inviting Bejar to come discuss his findings further. Bejar says he never heard back from Zuckerberg.