Lawyers suing Meta over teen mental health harms say the company's Instagram Teen Accounts team ordered baseball caps reading "a/c priv" - shorthand for attorney-client privilege - while that same privilege was being used to shield internal documents from court.
Meta's attorneys have repeatedly invoked attorney-client privilege to keep evidence out of public view in ongoing litigation over alleged harm to teens' mental health. In a court filing unsealed the week of September 21, 2026, plaintiffs' lawyers cited a document showing that Project Nido - the internal name for the team that built Instagram's Teen Accounts feature, launched in 2024 - put in an order for novelty hats printed with "a/c priv." The lawyers argue Meta has stretched the privilege far beyond its legal purpose, using it as a blanket to withhold material relevant to the case. They describe the hats as evidence of what they call a broader culture of privilege abuse inside the company.
Attorney-client privilege exists to protect legal advice, not to launder internal decision-making out of discovery. If a legal team's own merchandise becomes exhibit A in a fight over improper privilege claims, it undercuts Meta's credibility on every other privilege designation in the case. That matters because the underlying dispute is about what Meta knew, and when, about risks to teen users - not about hat budgets.
Corporate legal teams have branded gear for compliance trainings and holiday parties for decades; doing it for a privilege designation just hands plaintiffs' lawyers a punchline they didn't have to invent.