Meta's Legal Team Abandoned Its Ethical Duties

From Big Tobacco to Menlo Park — and the collapse of legal ethics

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In March 1770, as Boston boiled with outrage over the killing of five colonists by British soldiers, John Adams did something few could comprehend: he volunteered to defend the enemy. Adams believed that the very idea of liberty depended on ensuring that even the reviled had counsel; that a free country could not exist without an independent and impartial bar willing to defend the despised.

But Adams did not believe that his charge in defending his client was to win at all costs. “Every lawyer,” he reflected in his autobiography, “must hold himself responsible not only to his Country, but to the highest and most infallible of all Tribunals for the part he should act.” The moral map Adams established in this case became a foundation for the practice of law in America. Indeed, today’s legal ethics codes still speak of lawyers’ threefold duty: to the client, to the court, and to the country.

Imagine if Adams had decided that defending his clients meant winning at all costs. Can you imagine Bostonians’ outrage if Adams had, say, withheld evidence that the British soldiers did have murderous intent? What would Adams’s legal legacy be if he’d tried not to discover the truth of what happened outside the Custom House, but to sow doubt and uncertainty among the people of Boston? How different would our legal system be if the British soldiers were acquitted not because they were innocent, but because they had a lawyer who was willing to hide the truth?

Such a hypothetical has become our reality two and a half centuries later, only the victims are children, and its ethical corruption and harm operate at an industrial scale. What has emerged from inside Meta over recent months reveals how vacuous the characterization of the lawyer’s ethical obligations have become: Meta lawyers ordering evidence of child exploitation destroyed and research findings buried, while they hid behind attorney-client privilege. Meta’s lawyers do not follow Adams’ precedent, but, rather, the example set by Big Tobacco lawyers in the 1970s and ’80s. These lawyers collapsed Adams’ threefold duty into one — serve the client alone, whatever the cost to the courts and the country.

Tobacco Road to Menlo Park

The story of this ethical erosion begins not in Menlo Park but in the tobacco boardrooms of two generations ago, when Big Tobacco attorney Ernest Pepples outlined what he called the “honesty option”: admitting that smoking killed people. He conceded this would expose tobacco companies to catastrophic liability, and the companies ultimately rejected honesty in favor of profit. In the decades that followed, tobacco lawyers counseled document destruction, abused attorney-client privilege to suppress research, and intimidated scientists whose findings threatened litigation defenses. Big Tobacco’s attorneys perfected hiding the truth from the American people, abandoning their duties to the court and to the country. The cost of that abandonment can be measured in millions of lives and billions of dollars. The cost to the public trust is incalculable.

Fast forward 30 years to Meta headquarters where the multi-trillion dollar company’s attorneys are following Big Tobacco’s playbook, aiding and abetting the company’s disregard for public welfare and children’s safety. Meta’s leadership and legal team have hidden “mountains of evidence,” as Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch put it, of direct and indirect harms to kids and teens.

The latest revelations about Meta’s malfeasance come from newly unsealed court documents. In 2020, the company discovered through its own experimental research — an initiative known as Project Mercury — that when users reduced the amount of time they spent on Facebook, their levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness decreased. Meta’s lawyers buried the findings.

But Project Mercury, and Meta’s suppression of its damning research on the mental health effects of Instagram, is only the beginning. Deeper revelations come from whistleblowers Jason Sattizahn and Kayce Savage and their testimony before the U.S. Senate this past September. Sattizahn and Savage had been researching child exploitation in Meta’s VR ecosystem, where they discovered coordinated pedophile rings operating inside games like Roblox. Sattizahn and Savage described an immersive experience where children regularly encounter what Sattizahn called “the transmission of the motion and the audio of sex acts” from adult users — not just sexual words or adult “content,” but the physical experience of “adults sexually gratifying themselves” while “surrounding and hounding minors,” complete with immersive audio.

Sattizahn also testified how, after his research on Meta’s VR platform uncovered children under the age of 10 in Germany being propositioned for “sex acts, nude photos, and other acts that no child should ever be exposed to,” Meta’s in-house lawyers demanded the erasure of any and all evidence of this finding. When asked by Senator Josh Hawley how often she’d witnessed an underage user being exposed to inappropriate sexual content on Meta VR, Savage replied, “every time I use the headset.” The permissiveness by the company that Savage and Sattizahn testified to is mirrored by the more recently unsealed court documents, which included that Meta maintained a 17-strike policy for sex trafficking accounts — removing predators only after they were caught attempting to traffic people 17 separate times. Meta’s own internal documents called this threshold “very, very, very high.”

According to Sattizahn, Meta’s legal department created what he called a “funnel of manipulation” in response to these identified risks to children, a comprehensive system for controlling every aspect of safety research. Legal representatives embedded in research teams demanded destruction of findings deemed too sensitive. Researchers were forbidden to use words like “illegal” or “non-compliant” even when plainly applicable. Sattizahn and Savage’s testimony is complemented by internal communications, now public, showing that Meta employees worried they were behaving like tobacco executives “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”

On October 23, 2025, a judge in a separate case validated what the whistleblowers and court documents had described. Invoking the rarely used crime-fraud exception to pierce Meta’s attorney-client privilege, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Yvonne Williams found Meta’s lawyers had coached researchers to hide, block, and sanitize studies on teen mental-health harm in order to shield the company from liability. Judge Williams determined there was probable cause that these communications were “fundamentally inconsistent with the basic premises of the adversary system.”

Cracking Open the Cover-Up Machine

Attorney-client privilege was originally meant to protect candor in service of truth, but in Meta’s hands it has become a means of hiding the truth — a transformation that marks how far the legal profession has drifted. John Adams believed that truth was the lawyer’s surest refuge, the one place where all three duties could coexist. He wrote in his autobiography that his British client “must therefore expect from me no Art or Address, No Sophistry or Prevarication in such a Cause; nor any thing more than Fact, Evidence and Law would justify.” When lawyers abandon fact, evidence, and law, and turn their craft toward suppression instead, they corrode the foundation of public trust on which the entire legal system depends. Judge Williams’ ruling is thus more than a procedural rebuke; it is a reminder that the law’s legitimacy survives only so long as truth remains discoverable.

Yet Judge Williams’ ruling alone cannot stop Meta’s institutional misdeeds. Meta has thrived in an environment of passivity, thanks to lawyers who refuse to report ethical misconduct, bar associations that decline to investigate despite court findings of probable cause and reams of evidence in the public domain, legislators who prefer theater to legislation, and influential business leaders from other sectors who remain silent bystanders as tech lawyers remake the legal system into one that rewards grift and exploitation rather than enterprise and innovation.

Impunity is not inevitable. State bar associations should open investigations tomorrow and revoke reciprocity to Meta attorneys licensed in other jurisdictions. The evidence is public: testimony under oath, a judge’s finding of probable cause, court documents that speak for themselves. Investigations for potential disbarment should begin with senior leaders like Jennifer Newstead and Joel Kaplan, Meta’s respective heads of legal and public policy who bear responsibility under ethics rules for attorneys working under them.

Junior lawyers at the company who may have witnessed this systematic obstruction and failed to report it should also be scrutinized, as the rules of professional responsibility generally require lawyers to report professional misconduct by another lawyer “that raises a substantial question as to that lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness or fitness.” That none reported what they witnessed demands investigation at the very least. A stint in Meta’s legal department on a lawyer’s resume should be considered disqualifying by law firms and other future employers, making that lawyer unhireable if they cannot show that they spoke up about, or were otherwise unaware of, the suppression of evidence or harm. The fear of real consequences for playing a role in perpetrating such massive harm to American children should force Meta’s attorneys to either leave the company or to begin to stand up for what’s right.

Congress and state legislatures should also examine whether legal ethics rules require reform: whether attorney-client privilege has been extended too far when it shields corporations’ most questionable activities, and whether benefits of encouraging candid consultations with clients justify costs of facilitating cover-ups. Meta is not the only bad actor here, but it did get caught in the most egregious behavior. The unsealed court filings demonstrate similar behavior by Snap and by Google. OpenAI’s lawyers “accidentally” erased evidence compiled by The New York Times’s attorneys in its copyright lawsuit against the company. Judges have caught attorneys from Google and Apple withholding or destroying documents relevant to anti-trust trials. As Stuart Taylor in The Atlantic wrote of the tobacco lawyers two decades ago, we should invite the profession’s leaders to “explain why lawyers should remain free to hide evidence of corporate wrongdoing, mislead courts, and mangle the truth.”

The machinery for accountability exists. State bars can act tomorrow to investigate and suspend Meta’s attorneys. Judges can continue piercing false privilege claims and issue sanctions against bad-faith advocates. Legislators can demand bar associations justify their continued self-regulation and reform the rules of attorney-client privilege for corporations. Law firms can fire clients that ask them to violate their broader duties to the country and its courts. Importantly, holding corrupt, unethical lawyers accountable for enabling harms to children does not mean that we sacrifice the foundational tenet of the American legal system that John Adams championed: that even those we may despise — the redcoat soldier then, the billionaire and his exploitative empires now — will remain entitled to counsel who will zealously defend them, provided they follow the rules that the rest of us do.

Meta’s attorneys have forgotten that the law’s legitimacy derives from the integrity of those who practice it. For that reason, accountability for failing to follow the rules of professional ethics cannot be left in the hands of those who would pervert the principles at the heart of their profession so casually. Instead, it’s up to the rest of us — those who still believe law should serve justice — to ensure Meta’s attorneys are reminded of their obligations through real, material, swift, individual consequences. They are the architects of a system that harms children at an industrial scale, and every Meta lawyer who participated or stood by silently shares the moral stain of what the company has perpetrated.

Holding Meta accountable includes holding its lawyers accountable; the harm the company inflicts on young people could not exist without lawyers willing to enable it. Defrocking those lawyers could be what ends the impunity for Mark Zuckerberg, his lieutenants, and his empire.

The truth will out for Meta’s lawyers — eventually — as happened with Big Tobacco’s, but the stakes reach beyond any single company’s malfeasance or any one attorney’s lack of conscience. Just as tobacco lawyers’ corruption poisoned public trust, Meta’s attorneys threaten to complete the transformation of law into a service available only to those wealthy enough to corrupt it and shameless enough to ignore the wreckage. Whether courts can function, whether Americans believe law serves justice rather than a system many believe to be rigged, depends on whether those in power repudiate this conduct decisively, or whether they continue, through their inaction, to tacitly endorse it.