Meta employees ordered ‘attorney/client privilege’ hats while fighting child safety disclosures

Meta 员工在应对儿童安全披露诉讼期间定制了印有“律师/客户保密特权”字样的帽子

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.”

在针对 Meta 涉嫌危害青少年安全与心理健康的持续诉讼中，Meta 的律师辩称，出于“律师-客户保密特权”（attorney-client privilege），某些证据应禁止公开。起诉该公司的律师本周表示，这一标签被滥用得过于宽泛，并指出一份最近解封的文件显示，2024 年负责推出 Instagram“青少年账户”（Teen Accounts）的团队曾定制了一批棒球帽，上面赫然印着“a/c priv”（即“律师/客户保密特权”的缩写）。

The 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.

起诉 Meta 的律师认为，这些属于“Nido 项目”（青少年账户团队的内部代号）的周边产品，是 Meta“滥用保密特权文化”的一部分，旨在掩盖其内部针对青少年伤害所进行的研究，使其不被公众知晓。这一问题在 2021 年 Instagram 内部影响数据泄露后，马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）也曾进行过讨论。

US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers already called some of Meta’s privilege redactions “entirely inappropriate” in an order last month.

美国地方法院法官伊冯·冈萨雷斯·罗杰斯（Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers）在上个月的一项裁决中，已经将 Meta 的部分保密修订行为称为“完全不恰当”。

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.

她指出了一个例子：Meta 的律师曾试图将关于一份幻灯片演示文稿以及是否发布某些数据的讨论，包装成关于律师法律建议的讨论。法官根据庭审证词裁定，他们对发布数据的迟疑，更多是出于防止泄密的商业决策。

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.

2025 年 4 月，在证据开示程序结束后，Meta 取消了约 65,000 份此前被扣留或修订文件的保密指定。原告方表示，这些文件披露得太晚，已无法在证词陈述中使用。目前，Meta 已申请将重新审查其他保密修订的时间延长至今年年底，而原告律师则表示，应指派一名由 Meta 付费的第三方中立机构来主导此次审查。