Ex–Meta child-safety engineer tells jury his family was targeted on Instagram

A former Meta Platforms child-safety worker testified in court that he did not fully understand the dangers young people can face on Instagram until his own 14-year-old daughter signed up, according to a Yahoo Finance report.

The witness, Arturo Béjar, said he spent six years working on child safety tools at Meta. In his testimony, he described how the threats he later encountered through his daughter’s experience helped him understand the scale and nature of the risks he had been tasked with addressing at the company.

The case centers on allegations that Instagram, Meta’s photo and video platform, exposes minors to predatory behavior or other harmful content. Béjar’s testimony is being presented as evidence that even an employee with responsibility for child-safety efforts did not fully perceive the platform’s threats until he saw them firsthand through a family member.

Béjar’s account also underscores the gap that can exist between designing safety features and understanding how those risks manifest in real user settings. His testimony, as reported, was directed at explaining what he knew before his daughter began using the service, and what changed after he observed the experience directly.

For Meta, the trial echoes a broader, long-running scrutiny of how social platforms handle youth safety. Instagram is built around content discovery, recommendations, and engagement mechanisms that determine what users see and how quickly they connect with others, including in ways that can be difficult to monitor at scale.

The court does not necessarily treat one employee’s personal account as proof of all specific harms alleged in the case, and the report does not indicate which particular incidents involving Béjar’s daughter are being used as exhibits or what the defense has said in response. Key details such as the dates of events, the exact account interactions at issue, or any specific internal documentation that may be referenced are not included in the information provided in the report.

What to watch next is how the proceedings connect Béjar’s role on child-safety tooling to the specific claims before the jury, including whether other witnesses corroborate his view of the platform’s risk environment and whether the court considers the adequacy and effectiveness of Meta’s youth-protection measures in practice.