Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary committees on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April 10, 2018, about the use of Facebook data to target US voters in the 2016 election. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivas)Pablo Martinez Monsivas/AP
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Facebook and its lawyers have been fined $925,078 as part of an ongoing class action lawsuit.
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The site shared user data with businesses including the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
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A judge said in a ruling that Facebook spent years “trying to gaslight” the court about its conduct.
While Facebook’s parent company, Meta, agreed in December to pay $725 million to settle the Cambridge Analytica privacy lawsuit, a judge on Thursday decided that was not enough to ensure that the social media giant Learned your lesson for sharing user data without permission.
US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria ordered Facebook and its lawyers from the high-profile firm Gibson Dunn to pay an additional $925,078.51 to class action plaintiffs for “trying to gaslight” its users and the court about its conduct. was done.
According to the judge, Facebook and its attorneys “made a sustained, concerted, bad faith effort to put obstacle after obstacle in front of Plaintiffs — all in an effort to push Plaintiffs to settle the matter for at least Otherwise got.”
“Unfortunately, this type of conduct is not uncommon in our court system,” the judge wrote. “But it was unusually cocky and persistent here.”
The social media giant and its lawyers delayed proceedings and withheld evidence during depositions, refusing to disclose that user data was collected from individual claimants without their consent, Chhabria wrote. Even without sharing with third party businesses.
The judge’s ruling states, “At all times, Facebook and Gibson Dunn had the audacity to accuse Plaintiffs’ attorneys of delaying the case, and to claim that Plaintiffs had reasonable access to obtain clearly relevant findings.” The efforts were trivial.” “It’s almost as if Facebook and Gibson Dunn spent the better part of three years trying to gaslight their opponents, not to mention the Court.”
The class-action lawsuit was originally filed in 2018, after it was revealed that Facebook exposed the data of 87 million users to third-party businesses, including political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
The press about how Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, harvested the data of millions of Facebook users without their consent, using their details to target political advertising in hopes of influencing the outcome of the 2016 election leaked the details to The presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz paid more than $5 million to the firm.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg was eventually cleared of his knowledge and testified before a joint hearing of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees on whether Facebook could have done something to stop the issue before it was too late.
The court’s award of nearly $1 million for bad conduct during the trial proceedings is “loose change for a company like Facebook, and even for a law firm like Gibson Dunn,” the judge’s ruling acknowledged. According to Statista data, in 2022, the revenue normalized by meta was approximately US$116.6 billion.
“But it is important for the courts to help litigants avoid financial loss as a result of their opponents’ litigation misconduct,” the ruling continued. “And hopefully, this decision will create some incentive for Facebook and Gibson Dunn (and perhaps others as well) to move forward more respectfully.”
Gibson Dunn attorneys listed in the suit and representatives for Facebook did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
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