WASHINGTON — U.S. senators at a Tuesday hearing pushed for bipartisan legislation to protect children online.
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law heard testimony from whistleblower Arturo Bejar, who served as Facebook’s director of engineering for protect and care from 2009 to 2015. Committee members discussed paths forward for holding social media companies accountable for the harm they can cause children.
Bejar, who said he felt “helpless” when his own daughter experienced sexual harassment online, said he presented Mark Zuckerberg and other leaders at Meta, formerly named Facebook, with research that indicated the ways children were harmed by Instagram. The company also owns Instagram.
Bejar said Meta leadership disregarded his research and rejected his recommendations for making Facebook and Instagram safer. He also said some of the tools previously put in place to protect children had been rolled back.
