Mark Zuckerberg is not yet done with the scandal over Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm that partnered with Donald Trump campaign team ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Facebook, now known as Meta Platforms (META), allowed the company to harvest private data from tens of millions of its users that allowed it to profile voters.
Facebook paid a record $5 billion fine to the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Cambridge Analytica also played a role in the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK which saw an extensive Russian disinformation campaign.
At first Facebook went on the defensive, denying that it had any liability for spreading what turned out to be Russian disinformation. But many lawsuits and many boycotts later, the company did take responsibility for the information on its platform and promised to do better in the future at recognizing and removing coordinated misinformation campaigns.
A Six-Hour Deposition Awaits Zuckerberg
The case is once again knocking on the doors of Meta. Zuckerberg will be grilled for six hours by attorneys for plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the company. He will have to answer questions about how the firm handled the data of users that Cambridge Analytica was given access to, according to court documents.
This deposition is part of a complaint filed in California on behalf of users claiming to have been impacted by the manipulation of their data by Cambridge Analytica.
"With the assistance of the discovery mediators, the parties have agreed that plaintiffs may depose Mark Zuckerberg for 6 hours," it is specified in the court documents reviewed by TheStreet.
Sheryl Sandberg, who stepped down as chief operating officer (COO) in June, will also be deposed for five hours. Her successor Olivier Javier Olivan will be deposed for 3 hours, according to the filings.
The plaintiffs' lawyers also plan to depose various other Meta employees, including Facebook privacy officer Rob Sherman, former director of product management Eddie O’Neil, platform partnership executive Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook's policy's manager Allison Hendrix and vice-president of platform development Ime Archibong.
Depositions are in progress and are scheduled until 20 September. In civil procedural cases, people testify under oath, which means they are subject to perjury. The deposition is generally made in the offices of the plaintiffs' lawyers.
"We don't have a comment to share at this time," a Meta's spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
'Junk Files'
The plaintiffs' attorneys accuse Facebook of obstructing their search for evidence.
"Plaintiffs propounded discovery requests seeking financial information from Facebook in 2019," they say in the court filings. "As of July 1, 2022, Facebook had produced roughly 13,000 responsive documents, but more than 10,000 of those were junk files."
"What plaintiffs call 'junk' files are embedded images," the social media giant responds, according to court filings, and they "account for 34% of the documents produced after January 31, 2022."
The plaintiffs' lawyers hope that the depositions will allow them to discover new information which is not contained in the documents which have been given to them.
This complaint is one of multiple complaints against Facebook related to Cambridge Analytica. Washington D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, who is suing Facebook over the scandal, is also going after Zuckerberg personally.
Racine is using Zuckerberg's own words in his lawsuit against the social media billionaire as TheStreet's Tony Owusu wrote in May.
"Zuckerberg has said time and again that he and Facebook have a responsibility to protect users, and if they can’t, then they 'don’t deserve to serve [them].' Accordingly, the District brings this case to ensure that Mark Zuckerberg is held accountable for his role in Facebook violating the District’s consumer protection laws by misrepresenting the protection of user data and their blatant disregard and misuse of sensitive, personal data belonging to District residents," the lawsuit states.
