Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with a group of current and former company directors and officers, just agreed to settle to end a trial that sought $8 billion in damages, according to a report by Reuters. Zuckerberg and the others will actually be paying out to Meta shareholders as a recompense for damages allegedly caused by allowing repeated violations of Facebook users’ privacy.
The parties have not disclosed the details of the settlement, but one would assume the payout was less than the $8 billion the plaintiffs originally asked for. Judge Kathaleen McCormick adjourned the trial just as it was set to enter its second day and well before any of the major players were forced to take the stand.
Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who is a defendant in the trial and a Meta director, was scheduled to testify today. Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg were set to take the stand next week. Former board member Peter Thiel was also expected to testify.
Shareholders sued Zuckerberg, Andreessen, Sandberg and others to hold them liable for the billions of dollars in fines and legal costs the company has been forced to pay out in recent years as part of alleged privacy violations. For instance, the FTC fined Facebook $5 billion in 2019 after finding it failed to comply with a 2012 agreement to protect user data.
Company shareholders wanted the 11 defendants to use their personal wealth to reimburse the company. Plaintiffs alleged in the suit that the defendants failed to oversee FTC compliance and that they knowingly ran Facebook as an illegal data harvesting operation. The defendants denied the allegations, calling them “extreme claims”, before settling.
This all goes back to the infamous Cambridge Analytica bombshell, in which the political consulting firm accessed data from millions of Facebook users as part of Donald Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign. That led to the FTC fine, which was the largest ever issued at the time. Cambridge Analytica has since shuttered.
Several people had already taken the stand before both parties reached a settlement. An expert witness for the plaintiffs testified about “gaps and weaknesses” in Facebook’s privacy policies.
This is just one pending case against the company. There’s a big antitrust case that once again pits the FTC against Meta, alleging that the company participated in anticompetitive practices by purchasing one-time rivals Instagram and Whatsapp. The trial has ended but no decision has been reached.
Zuckerberg has been implicated in a case that alleges Meta knowingly used pirated materials to train its Llama AI. The company is also paying $25 million to settle a lawsuit with Donald Trump over his 2021 Facebook suspension, after Trump threatened Zuckerberg with retribution during the 2024 election. The current president was temporarily suspended from the platform after inciting a riot at the capitol that left several people dead.
