Judge Clears Meta Whistleblower Days Before Trial

A federal judge has cleared former Meta engineer Arturo Béjar to testify against the company and let state prosecutors put key documents in front of jurors at opening statements, dealing Meta a double loss two days before a landmark child-safety trial.

Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the Northern District of California issued the brief order Sunday morning, resolving two pretrial fights in favor of the multistate coalition of attorneys general suing Meta.

The trial opens Tuesday in federal court in Oakland. It is the first of thousands of federal actions against the company to reach a jury.

What the states allege

The suit accuses Meta of knowingly designing Facebook and Instagram features that get children addicted, fueling the youth mental health crisis, and of routinely collecting data on children under 13 without parental consent in violation of federal law.

"Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens. Its motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize its financial gains," the lawsuit says.

Dozens of states filed the case three years ago. Four are plaintiffs at this trial — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey — with the other 25 expected to go to trial later. The states are pressing claims under child privacy, false advertising and unfair competition statutes, each carrying per-violation penalties.

Meta disclosed in a legal filing that the damages sought could total as much as $1.4 trillion — close to the company's entire market capitalization. In a July 6 filing, Meta called a penalty of that size "untethered to any claimed violation" and said "a sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement."

The witness fight

Meta tried to knock Béjar out of the case, arguing he allowed Signal chats with other insiders to auto-delete in defiance of orders to retain them. The judge was unimpressed.

"Ultimately, it is obvious that this motion falls into the category of a 'Hail Mary' attempt to eliminate a strong witness for the plaintiffs," Gonzalez Rogers wrote. "The attempt fails."

Béjar, a former Meta engineer, has claimed for years that the company's child-safety tools were ineffective and that top executives knew the products were harming children. Meta's move to strike him came while he was testifying in a separate product liability suit brought by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti in state court in Nashville.

Meta also fought the early use of documents, telling the court that "many of the identified documents present one or more genuine admissibility disputes, including unresolved hearsay-within-hearsay issues, contested business records arguments, scope-of-employment challenges, Section 230 issues, prejudice concerns, and foundation objections."