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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
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
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.
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