Supreme Court allows multibillion-dollar class action to proceed against Meta
apnews.com
apnews.com
Anyone following this case and care to share their thoughts of how likely the plaintiffs are to prevail? Is the expectation that Meta will settle out of court?
My guess is that the justices will be frustrated by how little the issues on which the parties discuss in their briefs resemble the question they agreed to review. In an effort to offer something predictive about what we might see at the argument, I would point to two things. The first is a deep-seated skepticism of securities fraud litigation held by some of the justices, who tend to view litigation in this area as akin to extortion based on hindsight. The court has also issued a number of decisions in recent years in favor of corporate interests that have weakened federal regulators, including at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
On the other hand, it is a powerful benefit to the investors that the government filed a parallel suit against Facebook, contending that its disclosures about security breaches were insufficient; the government appears in full support of the investors and will share in their oral argument time. It similarly helps the investors that there is a forceful and direct friend-of-the-court brief signed by most of the most famous securities law scholars, arguing that the securities laws bar any kind of categorical exception for misleading statements made in forward-looking risk disclosures."
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/11/securities-disclosure-ove...
It's as if expecting recently IPO'd Beyond Meat to disclose to investors the possibility that someone might choke on a meatball they make with the meat...
But that’s not even what this is about. Facebook _did_ disclose those risks, but just not strongly worded enough in the hopes of the plaintiffs.
Similarly, the FB investors are hoping to show that FB executives knew something more about Cambridge Analytica and chose not to disclose it, or chose to downplay the risk. That’s fraud. The issue isn’t that something bad happened, investors have to take risks. The issue is whether FB knew, and misled investors by lying or intentionally misleading wording.
Thanks for the clarification. Let's see what happens.
1. It takes 4 of the 9 Justices to vote to take up a case. Given the current 6-3 split this likely means the conservative supermajrority voted to take the case. Why they then chose to dismiss it we can only speculate about;
2. The Supreme Court consistently sides with big business and this has likely been the case since its inception. This isn't strictly true but tends to be a good predictor of what cases the court takes and how it will rule;
3. SCOTUS is and always has been political. Supreme Court justices are political operatives;
4. This court will be inclined to side against Big Tech in general and social media in paritcular because of the war on the (implied right of) privacy and the pervasive myth that conservative voices are somehow being censored or silenced, despite lots of evidence that conservative rage-bait gets disproprotionately more distribution on recommendation algorithms.
One final piece of context regards the consequences of misuse of user data by the likes of Cambridge Analytica. Coming up soon is the potential ban of Tiktok. One argument for this is the influence of the Chinese government.
What you don't hear--from either party--is pushing for comprehensive user data protection legislation. So don't let any politican (of either party) tell you data privacy and protection is important to them. It is not. Or they would've done something about it.
It can be true that both conservative content gets more widely shared AND that they're still being censored.
There were countless high-profile conservatives banned from pre-Musk Twitter, YouTube and other social media. Likewise there's clear and obvious cases of conservative content being silenced like Donald Trump's interview on Joe Rogan kept off the YouTube trending page as the most recent example.
But these are specific cases, you claim there's lots of evidence that conservatives on the whole get more distribution. I'm not sure I believe that without seeing your purported evidence, but even if studies proved that were the case it doesn't negate the fact that simultaneously there's a large amount of conservatives being censored on top of that, preventing their distribution from going even further.
This is news to me. I learned about both the Joe Rogan and Shawn Ryan interviews from my Youtube front page.
[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1850982018064269423 [2] https://x.com/YouTubeInsider/status/1851016296269242434
When people file a lawsuit, it is given due consideration because sending it down to the dumpster.
According to the article, the supreme court actually declined to issue a ruling in this case. Curious if that causes you to update your beliefs in any manner.
(Futurama ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns8z1RYf9mM&t=1m11s)
Unfortunate how that's just how the system works.
Broadly speaking, our post-War system of laws puts consumers at the top. Right below them, investors. Way below them, workers.
If you engage the legal and regulatory system properly as a consumer, you can move mountains. Even without a lawyer. As an investor, you typically need a lawyer, but with that hurdle met you're similarly powerful. As a worker, the system seems to presume you're SOL on arrival.
That is not true. Failure to pay employee salaries is a very easy way to pierce the corporate veil. It is not just you become another creditor like a consumer or a supplier would be.
Legally, yes. Practically, many employers bounce paycheques and get away with it. It’s tedious to enforce worker rights in a way it isn’t for consumers. (In most states, you can get the AG basically working for you by copying their office on a complaint to the company.)
Not sure what the point of your argument is. Many employers get away with bouncing paychecks but you can get the state AG working for you by CCing them on email? The above comment claimed the law favored consumers and investors over employees and I gave a common case where they are not. Not the practicality of enforcing the law.
The same goes for employers too where employees steal or skip work and they are just fired instead of paying a lawyer (if they are incorporated a small business the owner can not represent the company usually) or going through the hassle of collecting proof, filing a factual police report and showing up in court to testify.
Doesn't change what the law is when it is worth it to pursue, and it was worth it to pursue against Meta for withholding material info to investors.
Yes, this is the practical reality of the law. What the law says on paper that isn’t enforced isn’t relevant to one’s day to day experience of it.
> going through the hassle of collecting proof, filing a factual police report and showing up in court to testify
The point is as a consumer various public bodies will do this for you. As an employee (or investor) you have to do it for yourself.
You can say that about any law. It is a negative argument. The law not being enforced has no relevance to my earlier statement; you incorrectly arguing employees have far fewer rights over consumers.
> The point is as a consumer various public bodies will do this for you. As an employee (or investor) you have to do it for yourself.
Once again, not true. Investor protection is literally the job of the SEC. OSHA protects employees from hazard workplaces. Every state has an agency that investigates wage theft. Many states governments make most of their money from personal incomes-they have an incentive to prevent wage theft.
Honestly, I would argue consumer protection is the weakest in the US of the three.
This is a cool thing to believe, your stories about this must be fascinating.
What have been the differences between your personal experiences engaging in the regulatory system in the United States as a consumer versus the times you’ve engaged with the regulatory system in the US as an investor?
The latter requires counsel. The former can command state attorneys generals, regulatory bodies and small-claims courts and arbitrators who, while imperfect to flawed, are paid for by the taxpayer or company.
I’m also making an in-system comparison. An American consumer is worse off, on average, than a European consumer.
> If you engage the legal and regulatory system properly as a consumer, you can move mountains. Even without a lawyer.
I have never heard someone claim that (which doesn't make it false). Almost everyone I interact with says the large investors and executives have far more power - and now far more power than ever. Companies trample on consumers and treat them like crap all the time - I don't know anyone who thinks consumers are powerful.
Use the legal system and you can end up buried in paperwork, discovery, and an unaffordable lawsuit that consumes many years of your life with no reliable outcome. Most people have to settle cases rather than fight deep-pocketed parties. Often you can't even get to court because of arbitration agreements, etc.
Who has done the things you claim? Is there some measure of how many?
This is accurate. Money is power. The point is that independent of wealth, the hierarchy holds. Even among the wealthy, the most powerful suits allege breaches of consumer rights or fundamental freedoms.
Could you give examples? The most 'powerful' (not sure what you mean exactly) suits are that I can think of off the top of my head are about M&A.
Are you living in the same reality where e.g. the US has vigorously broken up monopolies the past few decades, prevented mergers that hurt consumers, constantly enforced laws like the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, and prevented banks from closing the accounts of customers that are doing legal things they don't like?
I am not holding my breadth regardless of who is in white house, not even for single one.
I think you've got consumers and investors swapped there. Take a look at the EU, US consumers have extremely few protections.
But then again, I'm a foreigner, I know nothing about the US.
Yes, but there's a very important caveat: Only if you still have enough money to pay experienced lawyers at least >$50k to make that happen (and more money, to ensure your own lawyers are at least a little worried about any potential malpractice suit).
However corrupt you think the US legal system is, I guarantee you it's worse. But you're basically 100% correct; money is the most valued thing.
In many circles, of every socioeconomic class, things like honesty and integrity are openly derided - they get in the way of making money. Somehow, protecting people's basic needs falls into that class too. It's shockingly stupid, yet somehow normal - and even spun as a good thing - 'freedom'.
The wording here is confusing. They did not disclose that ... someone else who got the info would do something bad?
They said this after they knew the leak happened.
An odd fact of the U.S. legal system for public companies is that every crime is also securities fraud: If a company does a bad thing, and regulators find out about it, then the bad-thing regulators can punish it for doing the bad thing, but the securities regulators can also punish it for not disclosing the bad thing to shareholders. . . . It is a strange combination: Generally speaking the companies do the bad things on behalf of shareholders—to make more money for them—but then the securities regulators come in and fine them for defrauding shareholders.”
I’m a bit over this hyper-capitalistic market. When are C-level executives going to pay for their actions? Where is the jail time for these people?
This country is a joke.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4zd7X98eOs
[2] https://mashable.com/article/facebook-newspaper-ad-apology
This whole thing has been blown way out of proportion. Facebook is easy to hate and the facts get lost.
> Cambridge Analytica later obtained information from the app for about 50 million Facebook users, as the app also vacuumed up data on people’s friends — including those who never downloaded the app or gave explicit consent.
- https://apnews.com/article/c8f615be9523421998b4fcc16374ff37
On the other hand, there was a way to attribute loss in stock price that happened when the news of the scandal broke. Investors have a clearer path to arguing that they were harmed, even though they are not guaranteed to win the case.
Proving damages by externalities is very hard unfortunately.
For example I remember a case where foresters around here tried to sue coal companies for the acidified rain which killed a lot of pines and saplings and cost them a lot of money.
The courts denied any compensation because they should have known acid rain was a risk and they could not prove which sulphur compound molecules originated from which company. And I suppose courts would treat misuse of personal data the same.
Of the 87 million or so individuals who were impacted[1], only 270,000 gave their consent[2]:
The first step for those filling out the questionnaire was to grant access to their Facebook profiles. Once they did, an app then harvested their data and that of their friends."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-ana...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-ana...