Staff Report –

As the legal and financial heat continue to rain down on Mark Zuckerberg at Meta-Facebook, the tech giant has caved at the last minute and agreed to settle a massive lawsuit seeking billions in damages for allowing Cambridge Analytica to access the private data of tens of millions of users, data used to manipulate voters in the U.K. and the U.S. in the Brexit effort and the Trump campaign, for an undisclosed sum.

Four years after The Observer newspaper in the United Kingdom exposed the scandal that mired the tech giant in repeated controversy, it comes to light that Zuckerberg is “desperate to avoid being questioned over a cover-up,” according to Carole Cadwalladr, the Observer journalist who exposed the scandal depicted in “The Great Hack” on Netflix.

The news came out late Friday from The Guardian and Observer, a partner paper.

Court documents show that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has agreed to settle the case for an undisclosed amount, “a long-running lawsuit that claimed Facebook illegally shared user data with the UK analysis firm,” according to the papers.

So far neither The New York Times or Washington Post have produced stories on the case, so here’s what we know.

This news follows revelations of mass data misuse made by a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower to the Observer in 2018, an exposé that forced chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress and led to the social media firm receiving a multi-billion-pound fine. Days after the story was published, Facebook’s share price fell by the equivalent of more than $100 billion.

The papers report some dismay among sources that the timing of the potential settlement would prevent Zuckerberg and Meta’s outgoing chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, from being called to testify during potentially six hours of questioning by plaintiffs’ lawyers next month.

“It is a measure of how desperate Zuckerberg is to avoid answering questions about Facebook’s cover-up of the Cambridge Analytica data breach that Facebook has settled this case just days away from him being cross-examined under oath for six hours,” Cadwalladr said.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg, who recently announced she would be stepping down in the fall, faced questioning in depositions scheduled for Sept. 20.

A separate lawsuit filed last year claims that Facebook paid $4.9 billion more than necessary to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in a settlement over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, ostensibly in order to protect Zuckerberg, the company founder and majority shareholder.

The lawsuit alleged that the size of the $5 billion settlement was motivated by a desire to prevent Facebook’s founder from being named in the FTC complaint.

“Facebook has proved that they are prepared to pay almost any sum of money to avoid their executives answering these questions,” Cadwalladr said.

“The truth will come out one day,” she said. “But today is not that day.”

In the new court filing, disclosed late on Friday, financial terms or details of the preliminary settlement are not provided. The filing does ask the judge in the San Francisco federal court to put the class action lawsuit on hold for 60 days until the lawyers for both plaintiffs and Facebook finalize a written settlement.

The Observer asked Facebook and its lawyers to share more details of the in-principle settlement but they declined to respond.

The case was filed by a group of Facebook users alleging that the social media company and platform violated consumer privacy laws by sharing the personal data of users with other firms such as Cambridge Analytica. This was discovered after it came to light that the British analytics firm was connected to Steve Bannon and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for the White House.

Funded in part by right-wing fund raisers Robert and Rebecca Mercer, the company and the Trump campaign gained access to the data of as many as 87 million of the social media network’s subscribers in the U.S., and used psychometrics and a massive propaganda campaign on the platform, targeting “persuadable” voters in key swing states with fake memes, stories and videos demonizing Hillary Clinton, Black Lives Matter and other Democrats. Much of that messaging was also paid for and spread by Russians with ties to Valdamir Putin.

Cambridge Analytica declared itself bankrupt two months after the Observer exposé.

If Meta had lost the case at trial, it would have been a major blow to its reputation and stock value, and it could have been forced to pay hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in damages.

Facebook has previously said its privacy practices are consistent with its disclosures and “do not support any legal claims.”

Apparently they have also been paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to big media outlets like The New York Times and Washington Post, which calls into question why they are so far refusing to cover the story?

Imagine, if you will, what this technology could do if it was used for good, not dark evil. Imagine if the mission was to protect democracy, not destroy it. Imagine if the mission was to preserve the Earth, not trash it.

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