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

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: https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/09/meta-ac-priv-hats.jpg?quality=90&strip=all]

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.