When the history of social media is written, there must be a chapter for the whistleblowers who have played a vital role in enabling public scrutiny. In 2021 Frances Haugen, who had worked at Facebook (now Meta), released research revealing Instagram’s harmful effects on children. Last year another former employee, Arturo Béjar, gave evidence to Congress about the sexual harassment his daughter faced on the platform. The engineer’s work features in a lawsuit against the company launched by the attorney general of New Mexico, Raúl Torrez.
This follows last year’s investigation by the Guardian into online sex trafficking. It found that Meta is failing to report or even detect the extent of the online pimping of children. The company’s own documents show that about 100,000 children, mainly girls, are sexually harassed each day on Facebook and Instagram. Experts warn that job cuts at Meta and other businesses, particularly in moderation and safety teams, will make these problems even harder to manage. Last week Mr Béjar told the Guardian that Meta has refused to learn from the death of the British teenager Molly Russell, whose decision to take her own life in 2017 was influenced by suicide and self‑harm content she had viewed.
