Mark Zuckerberg already paid Texas $1.4 billion for lying about one privacy promise.
Now Ken Paxton is back – and this time he has a federal investigator's memo on his side.
What that memo says is something Zuckerberg has spent a year trying to bury.
How WhatsApp Became Meta's Biggest Privacy Lie
After years of Facebook scandals, Zuckerberg needed a way to convince Americans he'd changed.
WhatsApp was it.
WhatsApp is a messaging app Meta bought in 2014 and markets as the private alternative to everything else – the app where your conversations are sealed from the outside world, including from Meta itself.
That promise is stamped across every ad and every screen.
"Only you and the person you're talking to can read or listen to them – and no one else, not even WhatsApp."
Two billion people believed him.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's lawsuit says every word of it was a lie.
The lawsuit alleges Meta built an internal system where employees and contractors could submit requests to pull up and read WhatsApp messages on demand.
Itt cites a 2024 whistleblower complaint to the SEC describing that exact internal access system.
Then it cites something bigger.
A Commerce Department investigator wrote in a federal memo that there was "no limit" to the type of WhatsApp messages Meta could access.
Then the Biden administration shut the investigation down.
Meta Said the Same Thing Before Paying Texas $1.4 Billion
Meta's response was instant.
Spokesperson Margarita Franklin said the claims were false and the company would fight the suit.
That is word for word what Meta said in 2022 when Paxton sued them for secretly harvesting facial recognition data from millions of Texans without their consent.
Two years later, Zuckerberg wrote a $1.4 billion check.
Google gave the same answer when Paxton sued them for secretly tracking users' locations and incognito searches after those users had explicitly turned tracking off.
Last year, Google wrote a $1.375 billion check – the largest privacy settlement any single state has ever extracted from a tech company.
Paxton also announced the same week that his office is investigating Meta's smart glasses after reports that audio and video collected by the devices is not as private as Meta claims.
If Meta Lied About WhatsApp It Lied About Facebook Too
Zuckerberg did not build a social media company.
He built a surveillance company that figured out how to make people enjoy being watched.
Every Meta product – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp – exists to learn what you want, what you fear, and who you talk to, then sell that knowledge to advertisers before you realize it's gone.
WhatsApp was supposed to be the proof that a reformed Meta deserved your trust.
If the federal memo Paxton is citing is accurate, it was just a more sophisticated version of the same lie – and if Zuckerberg lied about WhatsApp, nothing he has ever told you about Facebook is true either.
Your Facebook messages are not private.
Your Facebook photos are not just yours.
The data you handed over for twenty years under the assumption that Zuckerberg was playing by the rules – he wasn't playing by the rules.
Trump endorsed Paxton for U.S. Senate last Tuesday ahead of his May 26 primary runoff against John Cornyn.
Paxton has already extracted $2.8 billion from Big Tech companies that swore your data was safe.
If this lawsuit follows the same road as the last two, Zuckerberg is about to find out that burying a federal investigation is a lot cheaper than what comes after Ken Paxton finds it.
Sources:
- Ken Paxton, "Attorney General Paxton Files Landmark Lawsuit Against Meta and WhatsApp for Lying About Privacy Measures," Office of the Texas Attorney General, May 21, 2026.
- Ken Paxton, "Attorney General Ken Paxton Secures $1.4 Billion Settlement with Meta Over Its Unauthorized Capture of Personal Biometric Data," Office of the Texas Attorney General, July 2024.
- Ken Paxton, "Attorney General Ken Paxton Finalizes Historic Settlement with Google and Secures $1.375 Billion," Office of the Texas Attorney General, October 2025.
- Arianna Hooker, "Texas sues Mark Zuckerberg's Meta over alleged lies about privacy," Daily Caller News Foundation, May 23, 2026.
