# A judge told Meta it may not suggest a witness had to keep his Signal messages

**Deck:** Asked in a Nashville courtroom about the settings on his phone, Arturo Bejar said he uses Signal with disappearing messages, because, as he put it, "from a professional paranoid, I try to be very mindful about my communications OPSEC." Eight days later that answer was a 26-page motion in Oakland asking a federal judge to keep him off the stand. The court heard argument on 13 August; today's written order called it a "Hail Mary" and drew a line that matters: Meta may ask him about the vanishing messages, but it may not tell the jury he was required to keep them.

**By:** URnetwork editorial
**Dateline:** San Francisco — August 16, 2026
**Category:** News / Analysis

---

On Thursday 30 July, in a Nashville courtroom, a Meta lawyer asked Arturo Bejar about the settings on his
phone. Bejar ran user security at Facebook, now Meta, for six years. He now testifies against it. He answered honestly.

"Yes, I have ephemeral messaging on Signal," Bejar said. "My background is a security engineer and from a
professional paranoid, I try to be very mindful about my communications OPSEC." Asked whether his texts with
former Meta colleagues disappear, he said: "Yes, they do."

We know he said it because Meta wrote it down. Eight days later that exchange was reproduced, with Meta's own
emphases, inside a 26-page motion in a federal court 2,000 miles away, asking the judge there to keep him
off the witness stand altogether.

The court heard argument on 13 August and gave its reasons on the record. Today the denial arrived
in writing.

"[I]t is obvious," Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers wrote, "that this motion falls into the category of a
'Hail Mary' attempt to eliminate a strong witness for the plaintiffs. The attempt fails, and although Meta
can cross-examine Bejar, it cannot imply that a legal obligation to preserve those texts existed."

## Paragraph 2, between the housekeeping

Pretrial Order No. 8 is three pages, filed two days before opening statements. The ruling is its
paragraph 2, one of five running from opening exhibits to briefing deadlines — an order that bundles a
holding with housekeeping.

"Meta's request to exclude Bejar from testifying at trial is DENIED," it reads.

Meta may ask Bejar why his messages vanish. It may not tell the jury he was required to keep them.

## Who he is, and why Meta wants him gone

Bejar left Meta in 2015 and went back four years later as a consultant to its Instagram unit, after his teenage
daughter and her friends told him about the unwanted sexual advances they were getting there. In October 2021 he sent what he found to Zuckerberg,
Instagram head Adam Mosseri and Sheryl Sandberg. He says the reply was "complete silence."

He has testified against Meta at three trials. On Tuesday he is expected to do it again
in Oakland, where 29 states accuse Meta of collecting children's data illegally, and four also say it lied about how safe its
products are.

Meta's motion argued that he had destroyed evidence by using an application that deletes messages on a
timer, and asked that he be excluded, or the jury told to infer the worst.

## Four notices, and who they belonged to

Bejar is not a party. Parties must preserve documents relevant to a lawsuit; witnesses
generally need not, unless something puts them on notice. So Meta built the duty out of whatever notice it could
find, and named four: the Tennessee attorney general's request in April 2023, New Mexico's civil
investigative demand that November, Meta's own subpoena in February 2025, and this court's December 2025
order for exactly the communications Meta says are missing.

The ruling does not take them in that sequence, but it answers all four. The first two are somebody else's
process, and Meta has no legal right to enforce another party's: "Meta has no standing to enforce a subpoena
issued by an attorney general," Gonzalez Rogers wrote. The third is Meta's own subpoena and the fourth is
this court's order, and whoever issued them, Meta cannot make them continuing. It "does not have, in
reality, a legal mechanism to enforce its claim that Bejar was under a continuing obligation to preserve
Signal communications. Meta did not itself require an ongoing production; nor did it issue a follow up
subpoena."

![Meta named four events it said obliged Arturo Bejar to preserve his Signal messages. Pretrial Order No. 8 holds that two belonged to other parties, and that neither of the two remaining created a continuing duty.](https://ur.io/blog/2026-08-16-01/figure-four-notices.png)

## Nashville, read from Oakland

Meta's theory of relevance was that Bejar had been recruiting former colleagues to testify against the
company, and that the messages would have shown it. Deciding whether she needed an evidentiary hearing at
all, Gonzalez Rogers read four days of his testimony from *State of Tennessee v. Meta Platforms*, where he
was the first witness called. "Very little concerned any allegations of recruitment," she found. "Rather,
the issues focused on Bejar's actual work at Meta."

## The deletion Meta cannot name

Meta cannot say what the missing messages said. What it has is an inference built out of pixels.

Bejar produced two Signal threads in March 2025 as eight screenshots, one thread with the whistleblower
Frances Haugen. He produced no metadata with them, which, Meta concedes, makes it "impossible for Meta to know exactly
how these chats were captured."

So Meta went to the picture. Signal's help page, the motion says, states that "[e]ach and every disappearing
message will have a timer countdown icon that is visible at the bottom of the message bubble." Meta found no countdown icons in
the eight screenshots, and from their absence concluded that Bejar must have turned the timer on after those
conversations, or switched it off to take those captures.

That is the modern evidentiary problem in one image: a company arguing a deletion from the bottom
edge of a message bubble in a screenshot of a conversation it was never part of.

## Meta's case is better than that makes it sound

On the general question the law is on Meta's side. Courts do sanction litigants for letting
evidence expire — spoliation, the destruction of material somebody was obliged to keep: a federal judge in Arkansas called a
mid-litigation switch to Signal "intentional, bad-faith spoliation of evidence" in 2019, and Meta's motion
cites two more. Gonzalez Rogers had also already ordered Bejar to hand these communications over, holding
that Meta's need outweighed his argument that disclosure would expose people who had spoken to him in
confidence.

And one window is genuinely awkward. Anneke Buffone, a Meta safety researcher laid off in December 2025, messaged Bejar on Signal; they had never met. Deposed in June 2026, she testified to exchanges in
December 2025 and February 2026 about this litigation. His final production came on 12 January 2026, after the first of them. No Signal messages with her were produced.

The best material against him is in the declaration he signed himself. He has, he says, "routinely purged unnecessary
information from my email accounts for many years," and did not keep the October 2021 memo to Zuckerberg — the
document his public account of Meta rests on. A judge could conclude, without thinking him dishonest, that a habitual deleter who had become a witness this important ought to have stopped
deleting.

His answer is a flat, sworn denial. "Meta's counsel has alleged that I used a feature they called 'auto
delete' or that I otherwise deleted messages. That is false." From the day he installed Signal in 2023 until he
finished producing in January 2026, he says, he used no auto-deletion on any exchange with a former Meta
employee. That reaches the December exchange. It stops short of the February one.

## The same idea, pointing two ways

The same order set a noon deadline, as directed at the 13 August hearing, for proposed jury instructions on
Section 230, the federal platform shield. Both sides filed today.

Meta's instruction asks that jurors be told they may not find it engaged in unfair practices, or any of its statements false or
misleading, on the basis of any of ten listed things. The sixth is "[a]llowing third-party
content to be private or to disappear after a period of time."

These are different bodies of law, and the shield argument is not one Meta invented: this court held in 2024
that ephemeral content is a protected publishing function, and the states' own instruction complies under protest. But it is the same idea — content that vanishes on a timer — arriving as a shield where Meta builds it and as
destruction of evidence where a witness uses it, over the signature of Ashley M. Simonsen of Covington &
Burling, Meta's outside counsel, in filings nine days apart.

## What the order does not say

It does not say that using Signal is protected, or that a witness may switch on a timer whenever he
likes. It says that this company could not enforce this claimed duty against this witness: no mechanism, no
follow-up subpoena, no standing over somebody else's demand, and no showing of "reliance actually communicated to Bejar."
That is narrower than a right, and more useful than one.

A court that finds no duty need not go on to forbid the losing party from implying one. This one did.

Meta, in a statement before trial, says it strongly disagrees with the states' allegations and points to
its longstanding work supporting young people.

Bejar explains why the app is on his phone. "Some people interested in discussing
issues like online safety are fearful that they will be retaliated against by Meta if their communications are
discovered."

## References

**Every filing in this case carries two docket numbers** — the trial docket `4:23-cv-05448` and the MDL
`4:22-md-03047-YGR` — and the order's own footnote directs parties to cite the trial number with the MDL
number in parentheses. Where only one number is given below, this desk has the MDL number and not the
trial one.

- **Pretrial Order No. 8**, Dkt. 534 in `4:23-cv-05448` (ECF **3392** in MDL `4:22-md-03047-YGR`), N.D.
  Cal., signed by Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers and filed **16 August 2026**. Retrieved from RECAP,
  HTTP 200, 267,251 bytes, 3 pages.
  `https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.401490/gov.uscourts.cand.401490.3392.0.pdf`
- **Meta's motion for spoliation sanctions**, Dkt. 511 (ECF 3347), 7 August 2026, 26 pages, retrieved and
  read in full (317,536 bytes).
  `https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.401490/gov.uscourts.cand.401490.3347.0.pdf`
  **The Nashville exchange quoted at the top of this piece is quoted from that motion**, at transcript
  1712:11–21. Meta's own version carries emphases and a bracketed gloss, neither reproduced here. This desk
  has not read the Tennessee transcript itself.
- **Bejar's opposition and sworn declaration**, ECF 3365 and 3365-1, 11 August 2026.
- **The 13 August hearing** rests on the order itself: ¶1 cites "the August 13, 2026 hearing", and ¶2 says
  "The Court heard argument on defendant's motion ... is DENIED" "[f]or reasons discussed further on the
  record". This desk has **not** read that transcript or any report of it, and makes no claim about the
  content of what was said there. The denial quoted in this piece is the written one, filed 16 August.
- **Meta's proposed Section 230 jury instruction**, ECF 3393-1, and the **State AGs'**, ECF 3394-1, both
  filed 16 August 2026. The instructions are in the exhibits, not the notices.
- *State of Tennessee v. Meta Platforms* — Davidson County Chancery Court, Chancellor Russell T. Perkins,
  brought by Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti under the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act; jury selection
  20 July 2026, listed for seven weeks. JURIST, 27 July 2026.
- **Meta's statement to reporters before trial** — not a filing. By Diana Novak Jones, 12 August 2026, read
  in syndication at Claims Journal (HTTP 200, 68,192 bytes) because that is the retrievable copy.
  `https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2026/08/12/339459.htm` It attributes the words to "a Meta
  spokesperson". This is the only non-court source in the piece and the only thing sourcing Meta's side.
- MLex, 30 July 2026, for the close of Bejar's four days in Nashville. Retrieved by `curl` with a browser
  user-agent; the article is paywalled below the standfirst and only the standfirst was read.

**Not established, and not asserted.** What any of the missing messages said. Whether Bejar's Haugen thread
is dated January–February 2024 as Meta says or 6 December 2023 as Bejar says — the two accounts cannot be
reconciled from the filings, so this piece dates it not at all. What the states are asking for in damages:
three sources give three different answers and none is authoritative. Signal's own help page could not be
retrieved from three clients today — `curl` with a browser UA, WebFetch and `r.jina.ai` all returned 403
behind Cloudflare, and the Internet Archive returned 503 — so the countdown-icon description is attributed
to Meta's motion rather than to Signal.

## Publication notes

**What this edition got wrong before it published, and who found it.** Two readability gates and five
translation desks read this piece. Between them they found forty-odd live defects in text that had already
passed an eight-draft ladder, an editorial board, fourteen verification probes by this desk and every
mechanical check. The ones worth printing:

- **The refusal was not today.** Chief Judge Gonzalez Rogers refused from the bench on **13 August**; today's
  order is the written reasons, and they go further than the bench did. The article said "Today she refused"
  through four rounds of correction. The order's own preamble cites "the hearing held on August 13, 2026",
  and this desk's own research file had recorded the three-day gap. A reader gate caught it.
- **The central section was wrong.** Meta named four events it said obliged Bejar to preserve his messages.
  This piece said the first two belonged to other parties and "the second two are Meta's". The fourth is
  *this court's* order. Four desks and a gate found it independently.
- **A ground was cut that the order contains.** In an earlier round this desk removed "no reliance it ever
  communicated to him" as unsupported. It is very nearly the order's own words — "no showing of standing or
  reliance, much less reliance actually communicated to Bejar" — and the Chinese desk withdrew its own
  earlier objection with the document in hand. It is restored, quoted.
- **Two claims were the opposite of the record.** The states' proposed instruction does not "concede" that
  ephemeral content is protected; its footnote 4 reserves the right to challenge that ruling on appeal. And
  Meta's proposed instruction is disjunctive — "based on **any** of the following" — which makes the piece's
  own comparison stronger than it had claimed, not weaker. Both were settled by a translator retrieving the
  exhibits.
- **An oddity this desk manufactured, then withdrew.** An earlier draft made much of a Sunday order setting a
  noon deadline the same Sunday. The order's preamble shows the parties were directed from the bench three
  days earlier. There was no impossible clock, and reporting one would have been the desk's error dressed as
  a finding.
- **Intervals.** A hot take dated Meta's motion "two days before opening statements": it is eleven days, and
  that error was introduced by this desk's own earlier correction. Buffone's exchanges were said to fall
  "inside the five weeks between the production order and his final production": the window is thirty-four
  days, and nothing in the record dates her December message inside it. The claim is gone; the dates are in
  the body.

**Verification.** Pretrial Order No. 8 and Meta's 26-page motion were retrieved and read in full by this
desk before any of the above. That read found the article's opening quotation had no recorded source — it is
genuine, and sits inside Meta's own motion at 1712:11-21, which is now stated in References.

**What it cost.** Five rounds of English changes propagated to five translators. Two of this desk's own
corrections introduced new defects, and both were caught downstream rather than by the desk that made them.

**Deviation.** Fable remained unavailable, so every stage of this edition ran on **opus**, as authorised for
the 15 August edition. Recorded in `blog-research/2026-08-15-01/DEVIATIONS.md`.

**Body length** 1,494 words, measured by `blog-temp/2026-08-16-01/wordcount.py`, which excludes front
matter and everything from the References heading onward, and counts the figure caption because that
caption is also the narrated audio segment.