Meta's Pay Structure, Not Its Policy Page, Is What the States Put on the Stand

Arturo Bejar, a former Meta engineering director, told jurors in federal court in Oakland on Wednesday that the attitude at Instagram toward users under 13 was "don't ask, don't tell" ^[1]. That single line matters beyond one courtroom because the four states now in trial were among 29 that sued Meta in 2023, and the other 25 are scheduled to go to trial later ^[5], while the lead plaintiffs say the remedy they primarily want is an injunction rather than money ^[14].

The case pits Meta against California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, began Tuesday, and is expected to run about six weeks ^[4]. Meta also faces suits in state courts, including one under way in Tennessee ^[6]. The complaint alleges Meta knowingly designed features that addict children and concealed the harms, and separately that it collects data on children under 13 without parental consent in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act ^[7]. Meta's position is that account holders must be at least 13, consistent with COPPA ^[8], and the company has rejected the claims and says the evidence will show its commitment to safety ^[9].

The load-bearing testimony is not the slogan. Bejar said performance reviews and compensation for employees working on user-facing products were mostly keyed to user numbers and time spent, and that "in that context, safety was an afterthought" ^[12]. He also said Meta consistently prioritized profit over safety in product design, focusing on frequency and duration of use even where that hurt wellbeing, adding: "If you step away from the product, they are not going to make any money" ^[2][3]. A pay-and-promotion argument is harder for a defendant to wave off than a leaked deck, because it describes a system rather than an incident, and it points at the exact levers a court could order changed.

The rest of the day filled in the mechanism. Bejar identified video autoplay and the counters that display likes, views, comments and follower totals as features built for adults and, in his words, "inherently unsafe for teenagers" ^[15]; child development experts have noted that teenagers are more susceptible to social comparison than adults, which makes popularity-rewarding products more harmful to them ^[16]. On age, he testified he found "tens of thousands" of under-13 users on Instagram in his own research and that their presence was "common knowledge" internally ^[17]. He began to describe Meta's detection infrastructure as among the most sophisticated in the world; the source transcript cuts off mid-sentence there ^[18].

Bejar's standing is the reason this is repeatable: he was at Facebook from 2009 to 2015 and returned as a safety contractor from 2019 to 2021 ^[10], roughly eight years inside ^[19], and he told Congress in 2023 that executives including Mark Zuckerberg knew of harms and chose not to make meaningful changes ^[11].

Watch the remedy, not the headline number. The states are seeking user-experience changes to Facebook and Instagram plus damages that could reach billions, with the amount set by the court if Meta loses ^[13]. An injunction that reaches autoplay, counters and age gating would set the template the other 25 states inherit ^[5][14][15], and the current four represent only about 14 percent of the plaintiff group ^[20]. Anyone building teen-facing product should assume the discoverable artifact is the compensation plan.