Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified 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 American voters in the 2016 election. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
Facebook and its lawyers have been fined $925,078 as part of an ongoing class action lawsuit.
The site shared user data with businesses including the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
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 wasn’t quite enough to ensure the social media giant had learned its 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 the class action plaintiffs for “trying to gaslight” their users and the court about its conduct.
Facebook and its lawyers, according to the judge, conducted “a sustained, concerted, bad-faith effort to throw obstacle after obstacle in front of the plaintiffs — all in an attempt to push the plaintiffs into settling the case for less than they would have gotten otherwise.”
“Unfortunately, this sort of conduct is not uncommon in our court system,” the judge wrote. “But it was unusually egregious and persistent here.”
The social media giant and its lawyers delayed proceedings and withheld evidence during depositions, Chhabria wrote, refusing to disclose what user data had been collected from individual claimants, despite sharing that data with third-party businesses without their consent.
“All the while, Facebook and Gibson Dunn had the audacity to accuse the plaintiffs’ lawyers of delaying the case, and to assert that the plaintiffs’ reasonable efforts to obtain obviously relevant discovery were frivolous,” the judge’s ruling added. “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 Facebook had exposed the data of 87 million users to third-party businesses, including the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, leaked details to the press about how the firm harvested the data of millions of Facebook users without their consent, using their details to target political advertising in hopes of swaying the outcome of the 2016 election. The presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz paid over $5 million each to the firm.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg was eventually deposed about his knowledge and testified before a joint hearing of the Senate’s Commerce and Judiciary Committees regarding whether Facebook could’ve done something to stop the issue before it was too late.
The court’s nearly $1 million sanction for poor conduct during the lawsuit proceedings “is loose change for a company like Facebook, and even for a law firm like Gibson Dunn,” the judge’s ruling acknowledged. In 2022, the revenue general by Meta amounted to roughly 116.6 billion US dollars, according to data by Statista.
“But it’s important for courts to help protect litigants from suffering financial harm as a result of their opponents’ litigation misconduct,” the ruling continued. “And hopefully, this ruling will create some incentive for Facebook and Gibson Dunn (and perhaps even others) to behave more honorably moving forward.”
Gibson Dunn lawyers listed in the suit and representatives for Facebook did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.