In a significant advancement, a trial involving Meta (formerly facebook) has been postponed following an agreement reached between the parties. The Delaware Court judge, Kathleen McCormick, announced the postponement as the trial was set to enter its second day, commending the parties for reaching a resolution.Prosecutors’ lawyer, Sam Closic, described the agreement as a rapid and surprising development. The trial was expected to feature testimony from prominent figures, including billionaire Mark Anderson, a member of Meta’s Board of Directors.
Shareholders had initiated the lawsuit, seeking to hold company officials accountable for billions of dollars in fines and legal expenses incurred by the company in recent years. Notably, the US Federal Trade Committee had fined Facebook $5 billion in 2019, citing the company’s failure to adhere to a 2012 agreement concerning the protection of user data.
Mark Zuckerberg was scheduled to testify on Monday, while Sheryl Sandberg‘s testimony was slated for Wednesday. The trial was anticipated to continue until the end of the following week. The shareholders had named eleven defendants, demanding they use their personal wealth to compensate the company, claims that the defendants had characterized as “extremist allegations.”
It is worth noting that Facebook rebranded to Meta in 2021,and the company itself was not a defendant in this particular case. The trial was also expected to include testimony from notable individuals such as Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn.
Meta investors had alleged that current and former board members had failed in their duty to oversee the company’s compliance with the 2012 agreement with the Federal Trade Committee. they further claimed that Zuckerberg and Sandberg had allowed Facebook to operate as an illegal platform for data collection.
This legal action emerged in the wake of revelations that the data of millions of Facebook users had been accessed by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that had worked with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. These data breaches led to the record-breaking fine imposed on Facebook by the Federal Trade Committee.
Conversely, Jeffrey Zients, a former board member, denied that the company had agreed to the fine to shield Zuckerberg from legal duty, as alleged by the shareholders.
(Source: Reuters)