Mark Zuckerberg is slated to make yet another high-stakes courtroom appearance this week as shareholders seek to hold him accountable for the more than $8 billion that Meta has spent to settle lawsuits over privacy violations.
The trial, set to begin Wednesday in Delaware’s Court of Chancery, aims to hold Zuckerberg, former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg and other former executives personally liable for the billions the company spent to resolve allegations that it failed to safeguard user data.
Shareholders argue that Zuckerberg, Sandberg and former VP Konstantinos Papamiltiadis violated their fiduciary duties by “intentionally” failing to ensure compliance with a 2012 Federal Trade Commission consent order requiring the firm then known as Facebook to protect user privacy.
4 Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to take the witness stand in a Delaware courtroom later this week. AFP via Getty Images
That failure, they say, enabled the Cambridge Analytica scandal — a notorious breach that saw data from tens of millions of Facebook users improperly harvested for political profiling.
Meta is not a named defendant in the suit and declined to comment on the case. Attorneys for the defendants did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday evening.
The case is a shareholder derivative lawsuit, a type of legal action that allows investors to sue company executives or board members on behalf of the company itself.
In these cases, shareholders argue that corporate insiders failed in their fiduciary duties and caused harm to the company—financial or otherwise—that management has failed to address.
In April, Zuckerberg was questioned by the Federal Trade Commission about internal communications surrounding Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
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