Meta employees ordered ‘attorney/client privilege’ hats while fighting child safety disclosures
Meta employees ordered ‘attorney/client privilege’ hats while fighting child safety disclosures
Lawyers suing Meta called the hats an example of its ‘culture of privilege abuse.’
Lawyers suing Meta called the hats an example of its ‘culture of privilege abuse.’
by Richard Lawler
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty ImagesPart OfSocial media on trial: tech giants face lawsuits over addiction, safety, and mental healthsee all updates 
Richard Lawler is a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget.Meta’s lawyers have argued that certain evidence should be withheld from public view on the grounds of attorney-client privilege in the ongoing lawsuits over alleged harm to teens’ safety and mental health. Lawyers suing the company said this week that the label has been applied far too broadly, while pointing to a recently unsealed document showing that the team behind launching Instagram’s Teen Accounts in 2024 put in an order for baseball caps that simply said “a/c priv.”
Image: 4:22-md-03047, document 3509-4The lawyers suing Meta argue the Project Nido (an internal name for the Teen Accounts team) swag is part of “culture of privilege abuse at Meta” aimed at keeping the research it’s conducted internally on teen harm out of the public eye, an issue that Mark Zuckerberg discussed after internal data on Instagram’s effects leaked in 2021.
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US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers already called some of Meta’s privilege redactions “entirely inappropriate” in an order last month.
She pointed out one example where Meta’s lawyers tried to cast a discussion about a slide deck and whether or not to publish certain data as a discussion of attorney legal advice, deciding that based on testimony from the trial, their reticence about publishing was more of a business decision focused on preventing leaks.
Meta de-designated about 65,000 previously withheld or redacted documents in April 2025, after discovery, which the plaintiffs say came too late for them to use in depositions. Now Meta has requested time through the end of this year to re-review other privilege redactions it’s made, while the plaintiffs’ lawyers say a neutral party should be appointed to lead the review, paid for by Meta.
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