Attorneys for Meta Platforms and several of its current and former leaders, including founder Mark Zuckerberg, are asking a Delaware judge to dismiss a shareholder lawsuit alleging the company has deliberately failed to protect users of its social media platforms from human trafficking and child sexual exploitation.
The lawsuit, filed last year by several investment funds, claims that Meta’s directors and senior executives have long known about rampant human trafficking and child sexual exploitation on Facebook and Instagram, but have failed to address the predatory behavior.
“For years, Meta’s directors and senior executives have known that pedophiles and human and sex traffickers have been using Facebook and Instagram to facilitate their noxious activities,” plaintiffs’ attorney Christine Mackintosh told Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster during a hearing Tuesday. “But despite this, Meta’s directors utterly failed to implement board level oversight and controls to ferret out these heinous activities and to stop them from proliferating on Meta’s platforms.”
David Ross, an attorney for Meta, argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed because the alleged conduct of the company’s leaders has not resulted in Meta suffering “corporate trauma” as required by Delaware law. The company also argues that the lawsuit’s claims are based on speculation that it might face future harm or loss.
