There’ve been plenty of signs that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is trying to play nice with President Donald Trump and his second administration. In New Mexico this week, the company’s legal team showed that may not extend to Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

A lawyer for the tech giant questioned the veracity of information coming from the Department of Health and Human Services, specifically because Kennedy leads the agency.

Kevin Huff, an attorney representing Meta, argued in court that a recent report on the dangers of screen time from the office of the surgeon general lacked “trustworthiness” due to Kennedy’s involvement and shouldn’t be allowed as evidence in ongoing litigation against the company.

“As Your Honor, I’m sure, is aware, Secretary Kennedy has unusual views about causation and vaccines. He recently said that Tylenol causes autism,” Huff told Judge Bryan Biedscheid of New Mexico’s 1st Judicial District Court Thursday. “We urge the court to consider Secretary Kennedy and his prior unsupported claims about causation in determining the trustworthiness of this document.”

The lawsuit, which the state of New Mexico brought against Meta in 2023, is focused on the company’s child protection practices. Huff argued that a surgeon general’s advisory that was issued earlier this week shouldn’t be considered because of Kennedy’s past history of “advancing claims that are contrary to science.”

Meta and other tech companies have not otherwise publicly commented on the screen time report, which was released as an advisory from the U.S. surgeon general’s office despite the role currently going unfilled.

The administration’s findings open with a two-page letter from Kennedy in which he writes that “features deliberately built into many tech platforms to promote ‘engagement’” can negatively impact children’s health and serve as “a path to addiction-like behavior.”

In response to questions from NOTUS about whether Huff’s comments represented the views of the company, a Meta spokesperson, Aaron Simpson, said via email, “This reflects a thorough discussion about the report’s admissibility, given it was made public just days before the trial was set to end.”

Meta and other social media companies have made clear attempts to improve their relationship with Trump and his supporters; Zuckerberg recently agreed to serve on Trump’s new technology panel, and Meta has joined Melania Trump’s AI coalition. The case in New Mexico shows areas of possible tension, particularly with Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement.

Kennedy has crusaded against Meta and its social media platforms for years, claiming that it censored him and the anti-vaccine organization he formerly chaired, Children’s Health Defense. Last year, the Supreme Court rejected without comment a claim Children’s Health Defense made against Meta.

Under Kennedy’s leadership, the White House MAHA Report reiterated the health secretary’s concerns about screen time, claiming that “American children have transitioned from an active, play-based childhood to a sedentary, technology-driven lifestyle, contributing to declines in physical and mental health.”

Meta is facing backlash at the state level as well. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez has argued that Meta endangered children by not doing enough to combat child sexual exploitation on its platforms and by purposefully making sites like Facebook and Instagram addictive to use.

In the first phase of the lawsuit, a jury found Meta liable for misleading users about the safety of its platforms and endangering children under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act and ordered the company to pay a $375 million fine. The lawsuit is now in its second phase, in which the state is asking the court to order Meta to pay additional damages and make changes to its platforms and company operations.

The state’s lawyers asked the judge to admit the screen time report, which recommends changes to tech company practices in line with those called for by the state, into evidence. Judge Biedscheid ultimately sided with the state and allowed the report to be included.

In his argument before the judge, Meta’s lawyer also questioned the timing of the report’s release, and asked that the judge require New Mexico to produce any communications that it had with the surgeon general’s office, the HHS office, or anyone else involved in the creation of this document, “so that we can see if there is a litigation purpose behind this document that might go to its trustworthiness.”

A New Mexico assistant attorney general, Steven Perfrement, told the judge that the state did not have any involvement in the surgeon general’s advisory or the timing of the report’s release, just days before the trial was set to end.

“Seeing the report yesterday was a surprise to me as anybody else,” said Perfrement. “I had not heard about it, didn’t know anything about it until it was issued and presented to me.”

HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.