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A federal judge blasted Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta for using attorney-client privilege to conceal thousands of potentially explosive legal documents related to kids’ social media addiction – stating that she had “never seen a company whose employees are so taken” with exploiting the legal loophole.
The harsh words surfaced during a testy Oct. 9 hearing in California federal court, just a couple of weeks after plaintiffs revealed that Instagram had made swag hats for its employees with the phrase “attorney-client privilege” to celebrate the 2024 launch of Instagram’s Teen Accounts. Critics previously lambasted the hats as an “utterly sick” joke about concealing explosive legal documents.
In the case in which the hat swag surfaced, a coalition of school districts have accused Meta of fueling a teen mental health crisis.
“I have never seen a company whose employees are so taken with the attorney-client privilege that they’d have caps made,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said during the hearing, according to a transcript obtained by The Post.
Meta attorney Ashley Simonsen fired back at the judge, asserting that the hats had “nothing to do” with “whether outside counsel properly applied the privilege in this case.”
Simonsen appeared to have interrupted the judge with her comment, prompting an irked Gonzalez Rogers to reply, “You need to stop talking when I start whether you like it or not.”
“A further review is required, period,” the judge added.
In a bizarre twist, Gonzalez Rogers also shot down a request by Meta’s Simonsen to use an AI model to speed up review of the withheld documents – asserting that the court couldn’t trust the model to be reliable without more information.
“I don’t trust AI, obviously, as much as you do,” the judge said. “The only way that argument would have any legs is if you trained a model on your own, and obviously all of the training would have to be done and disclosed — all of it — and all of the testing.”
Meta and attorneys for the plaintiffs ultimately agreed to jointly abide by the findings of an independent “special master” — retired US Judge Suzanne Segal, who will review the company’s classifications for some 170,000 documents and determine which were properly withheld and which weren’t.
Judge Gonzalez Rodgers approved the process on Wednesday.
In a joint filing on Monday, Meta agreed to go back over an average of 20,000 documents per week that were initially marked as privileged. It was given until Dec. 30 to complete the process.
Additionally, each week the special master will review a random sample of 200 documents that Meta claims should remained privileged or redacted. She’ll then make a decision on whether the classification is accurate – or if the docs should be turned over to the plaintiffs as requested.
Any company records that the special master determines should be unredacted must be turned over within five days. Meta also has to cover the cost of the review.
As The Post reported last month, online safety advocates were outraged over Meta’s decision to make the “attorney-client privilege” hats for employees – with one group, Fairplay, describing it as “utterly sick.”
“There is nothing funny about the damage Meta has done to kids’ lives,” Fairplay Communications Director Ashwin Verghese said at the time. “It’s good these revelations are coming out, though, so parents and policymakers know exactly how this company operates.”
Meta’s critics have argued for years that the company should be more transparent about its internal research and documents detailing the risks that apps like Facebook and Instagram pose to kids.
In one past instance, records from California court showed the company’s own researchers compared Instagram to a “drug” and said they were “basically pushers.”
Gonzalez Rogers is overseeing complex federal multidistrict litigation in California federal court – a bid to streamline thousands of cases that make similar claims about social media addiction and online harm into a few “bellwether” cases to determine the legal merits of their arguments.
In May, Meta reached a settlement with Breathitt County School District in Kentucky to avoid a trial that had been slated to begin in Oakland on June 15. However, thousands more are still pending.
Elsewhere, Meta reached a separate $18 billion settlement with a coalition of 48 state attorneys general In August. As part of that settlement, the company agreed to impose changes such as daily usage limits for teens.
Meta did not immediately return a request for comment.