scandal. This decision comes after Meta’s shareholders brought information in a case against the former COO and Jeff Zients, a former board member. The allegations brought to both of them regard their possible use of personal email accounts in order to communicate about certain issues regarding a 2018 shareholder lawsuit that accused Facebook leaders of contravening the law as well as their fiduciary duties.
Even more so, Sandberg and Jeff Zients also allegedly deleted emails from their personal inboxes even though the court instructed them not to do so. In a decision made this Tuesday, the Delaware judge overseeing the case discovered that the acquisition might be convincing.
The judge’s decision mentions The defendants disclosed Sandberg’s personal Gmail account, maintained under a pseudonym, that she used to ‘communicate about matters potentially relevant to the claims and defenses in this action,’” and that “Counsel’s failure to give a straight answer in Sandberg’s interrogatory responses or when answering plaintiffs’ questions supports an inference that Sandberg was not using an auto-delete function but rather picking and choosing which emails to delete.”.
In the process of sanctioning Sandberg, the judge also raised the legal standard for Sandberg’s positive defense, the defense being based on facts other than those that supported the plaintiffs’ claims. So, Sandberg is now responsible for proving her defense to be “clear and convincing”.
Moreover, in a statement for TechCrunch, a spokesperson for Sandberg said regarding the claims that the plaintiffs “have no merit”, also adding “All work emails were preserved on Facebook’s servers,”.
The initial courtroom battle started with allegations brought to Meta’s official regarding the violation of the 2012 Federal Trade Commission, also known as the FTC. In this agreement, the social media platform agreed to stop collecting personal data from users without their consent. However, allegedly, Facebook later sold the data collected to commercial partners among whom were Cambridge Analytica. They were also accused of removing disclosures from privacy settings that were needed under the FTC’s order.
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