A multi-billion lawsuit investors brought against Facebook for the Cambridge Analytica data breach can proceed, as the Supreme Court just shot down Facebook’s appeal in a one-sentence ruling.
Even if you remember the whole Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal from the first Trump Administration, where data from those dumb “personality quizzes” that many people were stupid enough to take was harvested to get Republicans elected, it is easy to forget that the scheme was originally intended to bolster Ted Cruz’s unsuccessful 2016 campaign for president. But when Trump got that year’s GOP nomination, the unscrupulously harvested data went to helping his campaign, though Facebook faced the music years later when their stock fell by $40 billion in one day in March 2018. (It has since recovered handsomely.)
Investors sued over having not been notified of the impending risk, and that case has bounced between appeals courts since. Since Facebook/Meta has mind-boggling amounts of money to throw at problems like this, the social media company appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court. But CBS News reported that on Friday morning, the Supreme Court denied Facebook’s appeal.
The denial came in a one-sentence opinion with no elaboration, merely stating, “The writ of certiorari is dismissed as improvidently granted.”
At issue here is whether Facebook appropriately notified investors that there was an enormously costly security breach scandal in the pipeline. At the time, the company wrote in a 10-K filing that "security breaches and improper access to or disclosure of our data or user data, or other hacking and phishing attacks on our systems, could harm our reputation and adversely affect our business."
The filing did not mention that the breach had actually happened, and that a financial reckoning was coming.
The Supreme Court’s ruling is not necessarily a win for the investors, it just allows the investors’ case against Meta to go forward.
For what it’s worth, the Biden administration had publicly sided with shareholders in the case, saying in a statement that "it is plainly misleading to characterize an adverse event that has already materialized as a merely hypothetical future risk."
Image: This is a shot of the outside of the Supreme Court of the United States building (SCOTUS). (Getty Images)
