THEY MAY REDACT IDENTITIES. THEY MAY NOT REDACT THE EVIDENCE.
The court identified the documents, custodians, contradictions, and revenue motive. The public now has the record required to demand preservation, unsealing, compulsory process, and criminal review.
THEY MAY REDACT IDENTITIES. THEY MAY NOT REDACT THE EVIDENCE.
The public record now supports preservation, compulsory process, unsealing, and criminal investigation. Summaries are no longer enough.
This is not a demand for gossip.
It is not a demand for employees’ home addresses, private medical information, personal email addresses, or the identities of victims and minors.
Those things may be protected.
The evidence may not be.
A publicly funded federal court is presently adjudicating allegations that one of the most powerful behavioral systems in history knowingly cultivated compulsive use, monetized human attention, collected extraordinary quantities of personal information, and publicly presented a materially different account of its products.
The court has now described internal studies, executive communications, corporate objectives, sworn testimony, public representations, revenue calculations, safety measures, and public-affairs strategies.
But descriptions are not the underlying evidence.
Summaries are not the source materials.
Selected quotations are not the complete communications.
The public cannot test an institutional account when the institution retains control over the context.
That is the line this publication draws.
They may redact private identities.
They may not redact the evidence of institutional conduct.
What the public record already establishes
On June 29, 2026, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California denied Meta’s motion for summary judgment in the state attorneys general’s social-media litigation.
That order did not convict Meta or any individual of a crime.
It did something immediately significant: it identified evidence substantial enough to require trial on major questions involving knowledge, falsity, materiality, compulsive use, harmful design, revenue, and public representations.
The order describes internal Meta documents indicating that employees believed some users were addicted to the company’s products.
It describes research concluding that problematic use was common on Instagram and that older teenage girls were particularly likely to experience it.
It describes internal concerns that driving additional sessions could incentivize a more addictive product.
It describes employees connecting the reproduction of harm to clicking, liking, sharing, engagement objectives, psychological vulnerabilities, and top-down directives designed to keep people returning.
It describes a 2019 email sent to Mark Zuckerberg, with Adam Mosseri and others included, concerning problematic use and evidence of negative effects on well-being.
It identifies additional research sent directly to Zuckerberg.
It identifies communications involving Antigone Davis concerning addiction and an integrated youth strategy.
It records Zuckerberg acknowledging in deposition that Meta knew problematic use affected a meaningful portion of its users.
The same order identifies public statements presenting a different picture.
Meta told the BBC in 2018 that a desire to make the product addictive did not factor into its design process.
Mosseri told Congress in 2021 that he did not believe the research showed Meta’s products were addictive.
Davis disputed describing the products as addictive and rejected a senator’s characterization that the business model depended upon holding more people’s attention for longer periods.
The court did not rule that these statements were criminal.
It ruled that the evidence created genuine disputes a jury could resolve against Meta.
That is not internet speculation.
That is a federal judicial record.
Knowledge, decision, benefit, representation
The relevant evidentiary chain is now visible:
Internal knowledge.
The company studied problematic use, compulsive behavior, psychological vulnerability, youth engagement, sleep disruption, body-image pressure, anxiety, depression, parental supervision, and the relationship between time spent and user retention.
Executive notice.
The court identified communications reaching Zuckerberg, Mosseri, Davis, the chief financial officer, and other senior personnel.
Deliberate decisions.
Trial materials summarized in an official Senate submission identify internal company goals involving increased time spent, teen engagement, sessions, sharing, retention, and escalating daily-use targets.
That submission also describes warnings presented to Zuckerberg before he reversed a protective restriction on appearance-altering filters.
Financial benefit.
The court describes Meta’s business model as converting attention and personal data into targeted-advertising revenue.
It identifies evidence that substantially all of Meta’s 2024 revenue came from advertising.
It identifies company strategies intended to increase youth engagement, retain young users into adulthood, and maximize long-term revenue growth.
Public representation.
Meta executives and representatives made statements to users, parents, investors, legislators, and the public concerning safety, addictive design, time spent, parental controls, and the effects of the company’s products.
Public-affairs management.
The order references documents concerning the shaping of public narratives, influencing parental sentiment, reaching policy elites, and using protective features as public proof points even when internal evidence allegedly showed that those features did not meaningfully change behavior.
Those five components—knowledge, decision, benefit, representation, and narrative management—are exactly why the underlying exhibits matter.
No summary can substitute for them.
The warfare-method comparison is no longer rhetorical
In June 2026, NATO Allied Command Transformation published a description of identity-based manipulation as a cognitive-warfare method.
The method exploits identity, emotion, grievance, belonging, and perceived conflict.
Social media, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and personalized targeting accelerate the operation.
The objective is to shape perception and behavior, fracture social trust, inflame divisions, and induce populations to act through manipulated identities.
That framework maps materially onto the machinery documented here:
Platforms collect or infer intimate personal characteristics.
Recommendation systems predict individual reactions.
Emotionally activating narratives receive distribution.
Creators reproduce templates that perform successfully.
Algorithms multiply those templates across populations.
Repetition changes what appears normal, common, necessary, or inevitable.
The resulting engagement produces more behavioral data.
That data improves the next round of prediction and targeting.
The Federal Trade Commission has reported that covered social-media and video-streaming companies collected or inferred categories involving household composition, marital status, parental status, newlyweds, and divorce support.
Facebook previously demonstrated through a controlled experiment involving 689,003 users that changing emotional exposure in News Feed could change users’ subsequent emotional expression.
The capability exists.
The targeting infrastructure exists.
The financial incentive exists.
The repeated narratives exist.
The recognized warfare method exists.
What compulsory process must determine is who knowingly selected the outcomes, who financed them, who directed them, who concealed them, and whether any participant employed independently criminal means.
Intent to cause every ultimate injury is not required
A criminal case does not necessarily require proof that a defendant intended every downstream consequence.
A person can be criminally responsible for an unlawful killing without having planned the death when the governing requirements for malice, recklessness, criminal negligence, or felony murder are satisfied.
The same principle of offense-specific culpability applies here.
Prosecutors would not need to prove that executives intended every addiction, suicide, psychiatric injury, divorce, or broken family.
They would need to prove the mental state required for the charged offense.
For wire fraud, the central question is whether particular people knowingly participated in material deception intended to obtain money or property through interstate communications.
For false statements, the question is whether a particular statement within federal jurisdiction was knowingly, willfully, and materially false.
For obstruction, the question is whether someone corruptly destroyed, altered, concealed, withheld, or interfered with evidence or a proceeding.
For conspiracy, the question is whether two or more people agreed to commit the underlying federal offense and acted to advance it.
For RICO, the government must establish an enterprise conducted through a pattern of qualifying predicate crimes.
The ultimate social injury does not replace those elements.
It also does not need to be the conspirators’ ultimate purpose when the actual agreement concerns deception, corrupt concealment, unlawful data practices, obstruction, or another qualifying offense.
The criminal question is not merely whether harm occurred.
It is whether specific people knew material facts, made deliberate decisions, coordinated representations, obtained money or property, and concealed or falsified the truth.
Lawful privacy has a boundary
Federal courts recognize a public right of access to judicial records.
Northern District of California Civil Local Rule 79-5 requires parties seeking secrecy to identify the legitimate interest supporting it, explain the injury disclosure would cause, establish why narrower alternatives are insufficient, and support the request with evidence.
Entire-document sealing is strongly disfavored.
A confidentiality designation or protective agreement between litigants is not enough by itself.
The June 2026 order found that many requests based upon generalized claims of confidential or proprietary information were overbroad.
The court denied those requests.
It permitted protection for employee names, personal email addresses, and other genuinely personal information.
That is the correct distinction.
Protect the person where appropriate.
Release the institutional evidence.
No company should be permitted to transform employee privacy into corporate invisibility.
Redact the private email address.
Do not redact what the executive was told.
Redact the home address.
Do not redact the decision.
Protect the minor.
Do not conceal the experiment.
Protect the victim’s medical information.
Do not conceal the revenue objective.
Protect a legitimate trade secret where the law requires it.
Do not use “proprietary” as a blanket over evidence of public deception, harmful design, failed safeguards, executive knowledge, or government representations.
These records must now be preserved and produced
The following docket materials have been identified by the federal court and must be preserved in their original form, including attachments, metadata, custodians, distribution lists, drafts, comments, revisions, and surrounding communications:
Docket 2783-2
Docket 2783-13
Docket 2783-17
Docket 2783-18
Docket 2784-10
Docket 2784-11
Docket 2784-12
Docket 2785-1
Docket 2785-6
Docket 2785-13
Docket 2785-17
Docket 2786-4
Docket 2786-5
Docket 2786-6
Docket 2787-20
Docket 2787-21
Docket 2787-22
Docket 2787-23
Docket 3029-7
Docket 3029-8
Docket 3029-9
The same requirement applies to the trial materials publicly identified as:
KGM Exhibit 12
KGM Exhibit 30
KGM Exhibit 42
KGM Exhibit 80
KGM Exhibit 85
KGM Exhibit 185
KGM Exhibit 338
KGM Exhibit 582
KGM Exhibit 1247
KGM Exhibit 1334
KGM Exhibit 1378
Preservation must extend beyond the final PDFs.
It must include:
Native documents
Complete email threads
Attachments
Document histories
Slack and Workplace messages
Text messages
Disappearing-message platforms
Executive briefing materials
Board presentations
Research dashboards
Experiment registries
Feature flags
Code branches
Ranking-objective changes
Safety reviews
Legal-review comments
Testimony drafts
Questions-for-the-record drafts
Investor-disclosure drafts
Public-relations instructions
Government communications
Contractor communications
Advertiser and audience-segment records
Creator-payment records
Model and recommendation logs
Retention-policy exceptions
Deletion and audit logs
Litigation-hold instructions
Every version matters.
Every custodian matters.
Every transmission matters.
Every deletion after notice matters.
Notice to the custodians
This publication and the attached evidence memorandum place relevant custodians on public notice that these records concern pending litigation, potential government investigations, public representations, consumer transactions, and possible federal offenses.
That notice applies to corporate executives.
It applies to product leaders.
It applies to research teams.
It applies to safety and integrity personnel.
It applies to advertising personnel.
It applies to public-policy teams.
It applies to communications teams.
It applies to in-house and outside counsel.
It applies to contractors.
It applies to government personnel possessing responsive records.
It applies to platform-account administrators, data suppliers, audience brokers, and compensated content networks if subsequent evidence connects them to the conduct under investigation.
No accusation is created merely by possessing a record.
But no custodian can plausibly claim that the evidentiary significance of these materials is now invisible.
Preserve them.
Do not delete them.
Do not alter them.
Do not rewrite their titles.
Do not remove their attachments.
Do not separate decisions from the warnings that preceded them.
Do not detach public statements from the internal materials available to the speaker.
Do not allow retention systems to destroy what a reasonable custodian knows may be relevant.
Do not use summaries to replace originals.
Do not use privacy to conceal institutional conduct.
Do not use a civil settlement to imply that possible criminal liability has been resolved.
What happens next
The attached Behavioral Dependency Criminal Evidence Supplement does not ask the public to manufacture a verdict.
It does something more consequential.
It identifies the established facts.
It separates judicial findings from allegations.
It grades the evidence.
It preserves the originating exhibit with a cryptographic hash.
It maps the documented mechanism to recognized cognitive-warfare methods.
It identifies the potential federal offenses.
It specifies the missing elements.
It lists the exact records capable of proving or disproving criminal intent.
It identifies the custodians.
It supplies the preservation protocol.
It defines the compulsory-process targets.
It prevents every responsible institution from claiming that no one told them where to look.
The public record already justifies preservation, unsealing, subpoenas, sworn testimony, and criminal review.
The remaining evidence is not somewhere abstract.
It has names.
It has docket numbers.
It has custodians.
It has metadata.
It has authors.
It has recipients.
It has revision histories.
It has payment records.
It has experiment assignments.
It has model objectives.
It has deletion logs.
It has a chain of custody.
The summaries are no longer enough
The public has been told that the evidence exists.
The public has been given portions of what it says.
The public has been told that internal knowledge differed materially from external representation.
The public has been told that engagement, retention, youth usage, advertising revenue, product design, psychological effects, safety messaging, and public-affairs strategy intersect inside the same record.
That disclosure creates a duty of public accountability even where the precise legal duties must be enforced through the court.
Release the substantive evidence.
Preserve every original.
Authenticate every exhibit.
Identify every decision-maker.
Trace every relevant wire and payment.
Compare every public representation with the knowledge available when it was made.
Determine whether safeguards were built to reduce harm or to provide political cover.
Determine whether users, advertisers, investors, parents, and regulators received materially deceptive information.
Determine whether anyone destroyed, falsified, concealed, or corruptly withheld evidence.
Determine whether independent offenses formed a continuing pattern conducted through an enterprise.
Then apply the law.
Not public relations.
Not another settlement designed to price the conduct into the business model.
Not another check written by shareholders while the individuals who made the decisions retain their positions, wealth, and authority.
The law.
If the evidence establishes civil liability, impose it.
If the evidence establishes regulatory violations, enforce them.
If the evidence establishes fraud, charge it.
If the evidence establishes obstruction, charge it.
If the evidence establishes qualifying predicates conducted through an enterprise, present the RICO case.
If individual criminal liability is established beyond a reasonable doubt, punishment belongs to the individuals responsible—not merely to a corporate treasury.
No one is being threatened.
Everyone is being notified.
The age of hiding institutional conduct behind curated summaries, confidential designations, civil settlements, and corporate checks has ended.
They may redact private identities.
They may not redact the evidence.
And if the complete record proves criminal conduct, the next document should not be another settlement agreement.
It should be an indictment.
