<story><title>Mother of all lawsuits quietly filed last month vs. Facebook in Delaware</title><url>https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1440304941428473857</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>willvarfar</author><text>Can someone please sum up the wider context?  What is happening to FB and what lawsuits are in play?  Is this a civil case or a criminal case?  Can Zuckerberg and co face jail time?  Or is this just routine cost-of-business some-state-shaking-down pay-fine-and-carry-on for FB?&lt;p&gt;From a layman picking up occasional news, it feels like states and countries and even investors often shake down the big tech companies, using court cases to extract money from tech companies for arbitrary perceived transgressions but really the money just goes to some unaffected government to fund other purposes and that these states and investors and things just take it in turns to demand money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davewritescode</author><text>Shake down is a completely unfair characterization of what&amp;#x27;s happening here.  Facebook is being sued because they&amp;#x27;re alleged to be damaging their shareholders in three ways.&lt;p&gt;1. They&amp;#x27;re using corporate funds to protect Zuckerberg personally.&lt;p&gt;2. They&amp;#x27;re in violation of an FTC Consent Decree relating to Cambridge Analytica which poses a material risk to shareholders as there are financial penalties for violating the agreement.&lt;p&gt;3. They&amp;#x27;re misleading Government and Customers about what data they&amp;#x27;re collecting and how they&amp;#x27;re protecting it, which opens them up to more lawsuits and further puts shareholders at risk.&lt;p&gt;Running a public company is a two-way street.  If you want access to public financing and the ability to shield individuals from personal financial&amp;#x2F;legal risk, you need to abide by certain rules relating to reporting and transparency.&lt;p&gt;If you don&amp;#x27;t want to be transparent, you don&amp;#x27;t have to IPO.</text></comment>
<story><title>Mother of all lawsuits quietly filed last month vs. Facebook in Delaware</title><url>https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1440304941428473857</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>willvarfar</author><text>Can someone please sum up the wider context?  What is happening to FB and what lawsuits are in play?  Is this a civil case or a criminal case?  Can Zuckerberg and co face jail time?  Or is this just routine cost-of-business some-state-shaking-down pay-fine-and-carry-on for FB?&lt;p&gt;From a layman picking up occasional news, it feels like states and countries and even investors often shake down the big tech companies, using court cases to extract money from tech companies for arbitrary perceived transgressions but really the money just goes to some unaffected government to fund other purposes and that these states and investors and things just take it in turns to demand money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tarsinge</author><text>Using the tech company label as if it was a random startup is not really relevant given the place Facebook has in our societies. Also it&amp;#x27;s not 00&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t be evil&amp;quot; anymore, governments should absolutely shake down ad tech IMHO.</text></comment>