How Donald Trump’s 2016 malpractice may cost Meta $725M legal fine

Meta, a Mark Zuckerberg company, has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of allowing millions of its users’ personal information to be harvested for political reasons.

Facebook had in 2016 supplied its data to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump’s victorious presidential campaign.

Meta Platforms, which is the holding company for Facebook and Instagram, was in court late Thursday to receive the judgment.

The Terms of the settlement reached were disclosed in court documents filed, however subjected to approval by a judge in a San Francisco federal court hearing set for March.

Backstory:

In 2018, two years after the US presidential election that brought in Donald Trump as president of the United States, news filtered that it was discovered that Cambridge Analytica, a firm with ties to Trump’s political strategist Steve Bannon, had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million users of the platform.

Upon investigation, it was discovered that the pack of data harvested was used to target U.S. voters during the 2016 campaign that gave Trump an added advantage during the polls.

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Not long, CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, was invited by the U.S. lawmakers during a high-profile congressional hearing. That year, the development led to many deleting their Facebook accounts, and going on to trend the hashtag #deleteFacebook across other social network.

Aftermath, and the rise of TikTok

Since 2018, Zuckerberg has had to attend series of court session to clear his company’s name. With the additional protest from users, we also saw how rival platforms such as TikTok had gained from the public backlash as people opt to entertain themselves the TikTok way.

Today, TikTok boasts of about 2 billion users worldwide, including nearly 200 million in the U.S. and Canada, where Facebook, Instagram once dominated.

Where is the case today?

In a statement on the case on Friday, Zuckerberg’s team described pursuing settlement as in the best interest of its community and shareholders.

“Over the last three years we revamped our approach to privacy and implemented a comprehensive privacy program. We look forward to continuing to build services people love and trust with privacy at the forefront.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, the principal cause of the lawsuit, has again declared interest to contest presidency against Joe Biden come 2024.

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