Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar spent Wednesday giving the states something every trial team wants early in a case: an insider who can explain how corporate priorities translated into product decisions.
Testifying before Chief U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, Béjar described a company where growth and engagement carried enormous institutional weight while safety concerns often struggled for comparable attention. He told jurors that features such as autoplay, visible popularity metrics and other engagement tools posed particular risks to teenagers, and he accused Instagram of tolerating under-13 users despite having sophisticated systems capable of identifying suspicious accounts.
For plaintiff lawyers following the social-media litigation, Béjar’s testimony matters because it moves the case away from the abstract question of whether social media can harm adolescents. His testimony went to a much more familiar liability framework: what Meta knew, what it could change, what it chose not to change, and why.
Trial resumes this morning in Oakland. Judge Gonzalez Rogers’ published schedule calls for proceedings Monday through Thursday from 8:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. No reliable public source has identified today’s witness lineup, so any specific name circulating before court opens should be treated cautiously.
August 19 — Béjar Puts Meta’s Internal Priorities on Trial
Béjar worked at Facebook from 2009 to 2015 and later returned as a contractor focused on Instagram safety and wellbeing. Much of Wednesday’s testimony centered on what product teams were expected to deliver and how those expectations shaped decision-making inside the company.
Employees responsible for user-facing products, Béjar said, were judged heavily on user growth and time spent on the platform. In that environment, he described safety as an “afterthought.” That point landed squarely on one of the states’ core themes.
Rather than argue only that Instagram and Facebook were capable of harming young users, the states are trying to show that Meta’s own incentive structure favored increased engagement even when safety concerns were known internally.
Béjar also put Mark Zuckerberg directly into that story. He testified that when Zuckerberg made an issue a true corporate priority, the organization responded quickly. Youth safety, in Béjar’s telling, never received the same treatment. He also disputed Zuckerberg’s public statements that Meta did not put profits ahead of safety and well-being.
For the plaintiff bar, that testimony is significant because it links executive authority to the product choices being challenged in the courtroom.
Product Design Moves to Center Stage
Wednesday’s testimony repeatedly returned to design.
Béjar criticized autoplay, popularity counters and other engagement features that, in his view, created particular risks for teenage users. His concern was not limited to harmful content posted by third parties. Instead, he focused on the architecture Meta itself built around that content. That distinction is central to the states’ case.
California made the same point in the opening statement: jurors are being asked to examine Meta’s own conduct—what the company said, what it failed to say, what it built and what it chose not to change.
For lawyers handling individual social-media injury cases, that is the terrain that matters. Product design, notice, safer alternatives and internal decision-making are much more consequential than a broad debate over whether children sometimes encounter harmful material online.
Safety Tools Come Under Fire
Meta is expected to point to years of work on wellbeing and safety features as evidence that it took these issues seriously.
Béjar attacked that defense from another direction. His criticism was not that Meta created no protective tools. He argued that some were structured in ways that made them far less effective than they could have been.
Instagram’s Take a Break feature was one example. Users must affirmatively enable certain protections, and Béjar argued that safety measures aimed at minors should not depend on a child making the safest choice every time.
His analogy was blunt: a driver should not have to turn on the airbag each time he gets into the car.
That testimony may become useful well beyond this trial. Plaintiff lawyers have been pressing a similar question throughout the social-media cases: if a safer configuration was available, why was the more protective setting not the default?
Under-13 Users Become a Separate Problem for Meta
Some of the sharper testimony Wednesday involved children younger than 13.
Meta says users must be at least 13 to open an account. Béjar told jurors that underage use was nevertheless widely understood inside the company. According to his testimony, Meta had sophisticated systems for detecting fake or suspicious accounts but lacked comparable internal goals or metrics aimed at identifying children believed to be younger than 13.
He characterized the approach as “don’t ask, don’t tell.” That evidence goes directly to the states’ federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) claims, but its value to the broader litigation could be greater. If jurors accept the premise that Meta knew substantial numbers of under-13 users were on its platforms and had tools capable of detecting them, the dispute shifts quickly from foreseeability to corporate response.
That is a much harder fact pattern for a defendant to explain.
Meta Pushes Back on Cross
Meta attorney Brian Stekloff used cross-examination to emphasize how difficult online safety problems are in practice.
Béjar acknowledged that he had worked with capable people at Meta and that no team, including his own, had solved every problem it confronted. Expect that theme to remain important for the defense.
Meta has already signaled that it will portray the states’ evidence as selective—individual documents, isolated statements and internal disagreements drawn from years of work by thousands of employees. It will also argue that safety involves tradeoffs, imperfect information and problems no platform can eliminate completely. Béjar’s answer, in substance, was that perfection is beside the point. That is likely where the parties will continue to divide.
Meta wants jurors focused on the impossibility of eliminating all online harm. Plaintiff-side lawyers will recognize the states’ narrower question: once the company knew of a particular risk, what did it reasonably do about it?
Why August 19 Matters
Béjar gave the states an evidentiary bridge from internal knowledge to product design.
His testimony touched nearly every issue likely to matter in the personal-injury cases waiting behind this government action: youth harm, executive notice, engagement metrics, design choices, default settings, underage users and the availability of safer alternatives. None of those subjects is new to lawyers following MDL No. 3047. What changed Wednesday was the setting.
Instead of appearing in a complaint, an expert report or a discovery dispute, those allegations were being explained by a former Meta insider in front of a jury. That gives the testimony a different kind of weight.
On Deck — Today, August 20
Court is scheduled to resume this morning before Judge Gonzalez Rogers in Courtroom 1 of the Oakland federal courthouse. Proceedings are set for 8:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., and the court continues to provide live audio while the jury is present.
No dependable public filing or court notice has identified the next witness. What bears watching is the sequence. Béjar has now supplied the insider account. If the states follow him with Meta researchers, internal documents, or executives who can independently corroborate parts of that account, his testimony becomes considerably more difficult to isolate as the view of one dissatisfied former employee. That is the evidentiary fight to watch today.
Trial Intelligence Takeaway
Wednesday was a useful day for the states because Béjar kept the case grounded in decisions rather than abstractions.
He did not simply tell jurors that teenagers can be harmed online. He described who inside Meta had information, how product teams were measured, which safety concerns were raised and what changes were available. For plaintiff lawyers, that is the more consequential story.
Meta can dispute Béjar’s characterization of the company, challenge his judgments and point to the substantial work it says it has done on safety. What it will eventually have to answer, however, is much narrower: When Meta knew a product feature created a meaningful risk for children, what did it do next?