Washington (AFP) – Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg and other company board members settled a shareholder lawsuit on Thursday concerning decisions made in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. A trial over the long-running case had just begun on Wednesday, with defendants accused of overpaying the US government in 2019 when they engineered a $5 billion settlement for alleged privacy violations in the scandal. Sources familiar with the matter confirmed the settlement to AFP, without providing details. A spokesman for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, declined to comment. Lawyers for the defendants and shareholders didn’t immediately return requests for comment.
The settlement comes the same day that Marc Andreessen, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capitalists and a Meta board member, was scheduled to take the stand. Zuckerberg himself was expected in the Wilmington, Delaware courtroom on Monday. Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel and former Meta top executive Sheryl Sandberg — both former board members — were also expected to face questioning in the court. Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting firm that was found to have improperly accessed personal data from millions of Facebook users for targeted political advertising, particularly during the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum.
The scandal thrust Facebook and Zuckerberg in particular into a political firestorm, leading to major regulatory changes and public scrutiny of tech companies’ data practices. The shareholders in the lawsuit alleged that the board members conspired to pay more to the US government in exchange for ensuring that Zuckerberg would not be named personally for wrongdoing in the settlement.
Longtime observers of the company were hoping that the trial would expose inside details of how Zuckerberg and the Facebook executives handled the scandal. “This settlement may bring relief to the parties involved, but it’s a missed opportunity for public accountability,” said Jason Kint, the head of Digital Content Next, a trade group for content providers. He worried that Meta “has successfully remade the ‘Cambridge Analytica’ scandal about a few bad actors rather than an unraveling of its entire business model of surveillance capitalism and the reciprocal, unbridled sharing of personal data.”
Zuckerberg was under huge pressure at the time from US and European lawmakers amid widespread allegations that Russia and other bad actors were weaponizing Facebook to sow chaos around major elections in the West. The multi-faceted case also alleged insider trading at the time of the events, with board members to be questioned about the timing of their share sales before the scandal erupted.
The high-profile case was expected to bring further attention to Delaware, the state that many US companies choose for incorporation due to its highly specialized courts. The trial was presided over and to be decided by Kathaleen McCormick, the same judge who last year rejected Elon Musk’s multi-billion pay package at Tesla. Tesla has since chosen to reincorporate in Texas and reports said that Meta was also considering a different state to register its business empire.
© 2024 AFP
