'Time and time again, profits won': The research Meta fought to keep sealed

‘Time and time again, profits won.’

That was California Deputy Attorney General Megan O'Neill, opening the states' case against Meta in an Oakland federal court. It is a claim about intent, and intent is the hardest thing to prove against a corporation — unless the corporation wrote it down.

The states say Meta did. Most of this trial will be about documents the company did not expect anyone outside it to read.

The Ruling That Made It Possible

Before any of this reached a jury, Meta fought to keep its internal research out of the case, and lost.

A federal court held that the company could not invoke attorney-client privilege to withhold internal documents and research relating to teen harm. That ruling matters more than it sounds. Privilege protects communications made for the purpose of obtaining legal advice; it does not protect ordinary business records simply because a lawyer was copied in.

Where a company routes internal research through counsel, the question a court has to answer is whether the work was genuinely legal advice or whether privilege was being used as a container. Meta's position did not survive that examination on these documents.

The practical effect is that the states obtained material the company had classified as beyond reach, and it is now evidence.

What The States Say It Shows

The allegations drawn from that material fall into three groups.

First, that Meta's own research identified harms to young users, and that this knowledge existed inside the company while its public position was that the evidence was unclear.

Second, that executives made product decisions they understood would harm teenagers, and shelved proposed safeguards on the basis of what those safeguards would cost in engagement or revenue. This is the specific allegation behind O'Neill's line — not that Meta was careless, but that it weighed the two and chose.

Third, and most serious in institutional terms, that the company misrepresented what it knew to the United States Senate. Unsealed filings have alleged Meta told the Senate Judiciary Committee it could not determine whether its platforms were linked to increased anxiety and depression among young users, while internal work bearing on that question existed. A bipartisan group of senators demanded documents from Mark Zuckerberg in 2023 after an unsealed filing raised that allegation.

These remain allegations. None has been established by a court, and the trial exists to test them.

Meta's Answer

Paul Schmidt, arguing for Meta, told the court that the states have misrepresented the company's platforms and policies, and that their case was built by cherrypicking internal documents and comments.

That defence deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed, because it describes a real feature of discovery in any large organisation.

A company of Meta's size generates enormous volumes of internal debate. Researchers are paid to identify problems; product staff are paid to argue against changes they think are unwarranted; someone in a long email thread will always have written the sharpest possible version of the worst possible interpretation. Producing millions of documents and extracting the most damaging hundred is a legitimate description of how adversarial litigation works, and it is not the same thing as establishing what an institution decided.

The counter-argument is equally real. Internal dissent only becomes evidence of corporate knowledge when it reached decision-makers and a decision followed. That is precisely what the states will attempt to show, and it is why the testimony matters as much as the paper.

Why The Witnesses Matter More Than The Documents

Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify. So is Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram.

A document establishes that something was written. A witness under cross-examination establishes what was understood and what was done about it. The states' theory requires connecting research to a decision, and the only people who can confirm or deny that connection are the people who made the decisions.

Meta's cherrypicking defence also creates an obligation. If the states' selection is unrepresentative, the natural way to demonstrate that is to put the fuller picture in front of the court — which means Meta's own witnesses walking through the same material and explaining what it actually meant.

The Larger Point

Whatever Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers concludes, this trial is producing something that has not existed before: a tested public record of what one of the largest technology companies knew about its effect on young users, and when.

Congressional hearings produced assertions. Journalism produced leaks. Neither carries the evidentiary weight of documents obtained under compulsion, authenticated in court, and put to the executives who wrote them, with cross-examination available to challenge every inference drawn from them.

That record will outlast the verdict. It becomes available to every regulator, legislature and litigant anywhere in the world with an interest in what social media does to children.

Meta spent years arguing this material was privileged. The reason that fight mattered is now becoming visible.