Arturo Béjar took the stand in Oakland on Wednesday and told a federal jury that the reason Meta could never fix its own safety problems was the culture Mark Zuckerberg had built. He is the first witness in a trial that four state attorneys general have spent years assembling.
The case opened on Tuesday before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers at the US District Court for the Northern District of California, with California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey arguing that Facebook and Instagram were engineered to hook minors and keep them scrolling.
In their opening statements, the states reduced the company’s model to three verbs: hook the users, hold them as long as possible, and harvest their data.
Béjar spent roughly eight years inside Meta working on exactly the problems now in dispute, first from 2009 to 2015 and again from 2019 to 2021. That second stint ended with an internal warning about teenage harm that he later took to the US Senate, and it is the spine of the states’ case.
“At the end of the day, it was the company culture that Mark had created that made it so that it was practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the wellbeing and safety issues,” he told the court, in testimony reported from Oakland.
