The year 2016, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign hired the services of Cambridge Analytica, an opaque consultancy that stole the data of up to 87 million users of Facebook to create psychological profiles and bombard them with an avalanche of custom propaganda, a major scandal of political manipulation that, after being uncovered in 2018, put the social media giant on the ropes. After four years of investigations, the District Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, where Washington is located, has denounced the company’s executive director, Mark Zuckerberg, considering that he had a “direct participation” in the violation of privacy of the users.
“We are suing Mark Zuckerberg for his role in Facebook’s deceptive privacy practices and for his inability to protect the data of millions of users,” Attorney General Karl Racine said on Monday after filing the lawsuit against the technology tycoon. In it, the boss of Meta (the parent company that also owns Instagram and WhatsApp) is accused of contributing to the scandal with a loose monitoring of user dataas well as being responsible for privacy agreements described as misleading.
The prosecutor’s decision to include Zuckerberg in the lawsuit dates back to 2018, when his request to personalize the accusation was rejected as “almost bad faith” by the judge overseeing the case, who ruled that holding Facebook’s CEO accountable in the case did not provide “more relief” for the victims. Nevertheless, Zuckerberg admitted his personal responsibility in the leak mass of that data. “The mistake was mine and I’m sorry,” she confessed before the United States Senate.
The lawsuit points to the “unprecedented level of control” Zuckerberg has over Facebook. And it is that, unlike what happens in other large technology companies, the businessman controls almost 60% of the company’s voting shares and oversee all the big decisions.
Racine, who has described the case as “the largest consumer privacy scandal in the nation’s history,” is now back at it. His lawsuit has already been filed with the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, which will decide whether to point directly to one of the most influential men of the last two decades.
succession of scandals
After the scandal and malpractice of Cambridge Analytica, which used the extortion with prostitutes to manipulate political campaigns and support its clients, the firm ended up declaring bankruptcy. Forced, Facebook ended up reinforcing its privacy policies.
However, last year another scandal broke out under the social giant’s nose when a former employee denounced, providing internal company documents, that profits are put before user safety or the psychological damage that platforms like Instagram cause in people. teenagers.
Cambridge Analytica was founded in 2013 by businessman Robert Mercer, one of the main financiers of ultra-conservative Republican politicians such as Ted Cruz or Ben Carson, candidates whom he also supported with his disinformation tactics. Although the firm ended up disappearing, since then the dirty war business on the internet has proliferated around the world.