How To Reduce the Sexual Solicitation of Teens on Instagram

On October 27, 2023, I received a cryptic email from a friend introducing me to Arturo Béjar and suggesting that we should talk. I was in a frantic period of final revisions on The Anxious Generation, so I asked Arturo for more information before I would agree to talk with him on Zoom. He said he could not explain it by email, but it would all make sense in two weeks. 

Eleven days later, Arturo gave damning testimony to a Senate Judiciary subcommittee about Meta’s repeated failures to take relatively simple steps to improve the safety of all users, particularly teens. Arturo had been a high-level employee at Facebook and Instagram, leading teams working on safety and security. When he found out that his own 14-year-old daughter had been regularly receiving sexually suggestive comments and propositions on Instagram and had no way to report them, Arturo suggested some relatively simple fixes that would make it easier for future users to report such behavior and that would allow the company to help when this happened. The company took no action. In fact, over time, some of the safety features that Arturo’s team had implemented years earlier were removed. Arturo then shifted his efforts to lead an internal study of the extent to which teens had harmful experiences on Instagram. The results were staggering, and he ensured that the executive team was aware of his findings.

Arturo told his story in that Senate hearing, in the 291 pages of evidence he submitted along with his testimony, and in the set of documents he posted on his own website, intended to help the industry to do better. But perhaps because of the crush of world news around that time, the news coverage was relatively brief. This is a shame because, like Frances Haugen before him, Arturo gathered evidence carefully and laid out possible solutions explicitly. Zach and I believe Arturo’s story needs to be more widely known, so we invited him to revise one of his essays and tell his story here, with links to his other essays at the bottom of this post.

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