NEW YORK, July 18: Meta Platforms chairman Mark Zuckerberg, along with current and former company directors and officers, has agreed to settle a lawsuit seeking $8 billion in damages over repeated privacy breaches involving Facebook users during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The settlement was disclosed by a lawyer representing shareholders during a hearing before Judge Kathaleen McCormick at the Delaware Court of Chancery on Thursday. While the terms of the agreement were not made public, the trial was adjourned just as it was set to enter its second day.
According to a CNN report citing Reuters, plaintiffs’ attorney Sam Closic stated that the settlement “came together quickly.” Among those scheduled to testify was Meta director and billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who is one of the defendants.
The lawsuit, filed by Meta shareholders, sought to hold Zuckerberg, Andreessen, former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, and other ex-executives personally responsible for billions in fines and legal expenses Meta incurred in recent years.
In 2019, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion for failing to comply with a 2012 consent decree to protect user data. Shareholders argued that company leaders should cover these costs out of their own personal assets, though the defendants denied any wrongdoing and labeled the accusations as “extreme.”
Facebook, which rebranded as Meta in 2021, was not named as a defendant in the case. The lawsuit stemmed from the scandal involving the now-defunct firm Cambridge Analytica, which improperly accessed data from millions of Facebook users while working on Trump’s 2016 campaign—an incident that ultimately triggered the FTC fine.
