Lawsuit against Meta okayed in London, seek £3bn compensation

With original claim being thwarted last year, a revised version of lawsuit has now been accepted which is said to be heard by 2026

Alexander Lewis - Feb 16, 2024

The image displays Facebook written in text. — Unsplash/file

A London-based judge has signaled to initiate the proceedings into a mass lawsuit lodged against Meta, Facebook's parent company, by by legal academic Dr Liza Lovdahl Gormsen for 45 million Facebook users.

With the original claim being thwarted last year, a revised version of the lawsuit has now been accepted which is said to be heard by 2026.

Although the revised and approved legal action claims that "Facebook has struck an unfair bargain with its users," the Facebook owner refutes them, remarking that the claims made by public's representative petitioner in the lawsuit "remain entirely without merit and we will vigorously defend against them".

As reported by BBC, Legal documents state that Facebook exploited the dominance, it has with its massive user base, by acquiring users' data from non-Facebook products, including Meta-owned Instagram and other third-party sites.

Sharing data with third parties had become "a condition of accessing the Facebook platform, pursuant to a 'take-it-or-leave-it' offer," the lawsuit stated.

The lawsuit requires Meta to pay £2.07-3.1bn in compensation to users who had Facebook accounts between February 2016 and October 2023.

Facebook is a free social media platform to use, and given that, its primary source of income remains advertising and endorsement. To make the most of it, the platform needs tremendous data, and the more it has it, the better it can tap into advertisers' target audience.

Meta said the "fundamental concerns identified by the tribunal in its February 2023 judgement have not been resolved," while adding that it was "committed to giving people meaningful control" of the content they shared on the platforms and to "invest heavily to create tools that allow them to do so."

Set to be heard at the Competition Appeal Tribunal, the case is being funded by Innsworth, a company backed by an investment management fund, which has also funded mass legal actions against Mastercard, Ericsson and Volkswagen in the past.