Meta is getting sued over allegations that Instagram and Facebook harm teens’ mental health and safety. Standard high-stakes litigation. What’s not standard: the company’s Teen Accounts team apparently ordered baseball caps that just said “a/c priv.”

Short for attorney-client privilege. You know, the legal protection that keeps confidential communications between lawyers and clients out of court. Except it doesn’t work like that, and Meta’s opponents are using the hat order as exhibit A in their argument that the company has been slapping the privilege label on documents far too broadly.

The caps came up in a filing this week from lawyers suing Meta in the consolidated teen safety cases. They point to a recently unsealed document showing the order was placed while the team was developing Teen Accounts, Instagram’s feature launched in 2024 with new restrictions for users under 18. The filing argues Meta has systematically overclaimed privilege to keep damaging evidence out of public view.

The Privilege Problem

Attorney-client privilege protects confidential communications between a lawyer and client for the purpose of seeking or providing legal advice. It’s narrow by design. Just cc’ing a lawyer on an email doesn’t make the whole thing privileged. Neither does sticking “attorney-client privileged” in the subject line, or apparently, wearing a hat that says so.

What matters is whether the communication was actually for legal advice. Business strategy discussions don’t count, even if lawyers are in the room. Neither do facts about what the company knew or did, as opposed to legal analysis of those facts.

The lawyers suing Meta say the company has been playing fast and loose with these rules. They argue that huge volumes of documents have been marked privileged when they shouldn’t be, particularly around product development decisions that go to the heart of the case: what Meta knew about harms to teens and what it chose to do about it.

The baseball caps don’t prove the privilege claims are wrong, but they’re a pretty good illustration of the mindset. If your product team is ordering matching hats that say “attorney-client privilege,” you’re probably not thinking carefully about the legal standard. You’re treating privilege like a magic shield.

What Happens Next

The court will have to rule on the specific privilege disputes. That usually means the judge reviews contested documents in camera (privately) to decide whether privilege actually applies. It’s tedious work, and in a case this size, there are likely thousands of documents at issue.

If the judge agrees with Meta’s opponents and finds the company overclaimed privilege, those documents come into the case. That could include internal research on teen mental health impacts, strategy discussions about safety features, and communications about how to respond to known problems.

For Meta, the stakes are obvious. These cases could result in major damages and force changes to how Instagram and Facebook work for teen users. The company has already rolled out Teen Accounts with more restrictive defaults, but that doesn’t moot claims about past conduct.

The broader question is whether this is just aggressive lawyering or something worse. Courts have sanctioned companies before for abusing privilege claims to hide unfavorable evidence. The standard is high, you have to show the claims weren’t just wrong but made in bad faith, but judges don’t like it when privilege gets weaponized.

The Pattern

This isn’t the first time Meta’s privilege claims have drawn fire. In the Cambridge Analytica litigation, in the antitrust cases, in various other matters, opponents have accused the company of overclaiming. That doesn’t mean the accusations are always right, but it’s a pattern.

The company’s position is that it’s entitled to protect its confidential legal communications, full stop. Fair enough. But privilege exists to encourage candid conversations with lawyers, not to let companies hide business decisions behind a legal curtain.

The baseball caps probably seemed like a harmless inside joke at the time. Put them on, and everything you say is privileged, right? Except that’s not how it works, and now they’re evidence that Meta’s approach to privilege might be more about marketing than law.

A judge will sort out what’s actually protected. But the fact that anyone thought “a/c priv” hats were a good idea tells you something about how the company was thinking about legal exposure while building products for teenagers.