Law360 Interviews Partner Darren Robbins on Reviving Meta Investor Securities Fraud Case

In a compelling narrative that runs counter to the persistent headlines of big tech running roughshod over users’ expectations of privacy, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP is holding Facebook (now Meta) accountable for allegedly misleading investors in a scandal involving consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

In 2018, the public learned that Cambridge Analytica had secretly harvested and kept personal Facebook user data. Later, news revealed Facebook’s extensive practice of sharing user data without consent, including allowing Cambridge Analytica to “exploit the personal data of more than 50 million users without their consent,” as noted in Law360’s interview with partner Darren Robbins.

Investors allege that Facebook and certain executives’ false and misleading statements led to inflated stock prices as a result of the Cambridge Analytica disclosures and subsequent revelations. In October 2023, the Ninth Circuit partially reversed the dismissal of the securities fraud case against Meta (formerly Facebook). In doing so, it relied on precedent Robbins Geller attorneys established in In re Alphabet, Inc. Securities Litigation.

In explaining a crucial argument that helped revive the case after the dismissal, Law360 paraphrases partner Robbins as saying that “at its core the appeal was about whether Facebook, now Meta Platforms, had misled investors in its risk statements by describing improper use of user data by third parties as a potential harm when the company knew that such misuse had already happened.”

The court responded, in part, by agreeing that “[a] reasonable investor . . . would have understood the risk of a third party accessing and utilizing Facebook user data improperly to be merely conjectural.”

On December 4, after Law360 published its interview with Robbins, the Ninth Circuit denied Facebook’s petition for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc, remanding the case to the district court for further proceedings.

Read the interview at https://www.law360.com/pulse/articles/1767852

About Robbins Geller

Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP is one of the world’s leading complex litigation firms, representing plaintiffs in securities fraud, shareholder derivative, antitrust, corporate takeover, and consumer fraud and privacy cases. With 200 lawyers in 10 offices, Robbins Geller is one of the world’s largest plaintiffs’ firms, and the Firm’s attorneys have obtained many of the largest securities, antitrust, and consumer class action recoveries in history.

The Firm is ranked #1 on the most recent ISS Securities Class Action Services Top 50 Report for recovering more than $1.75 billion for investors in 2022 — the third year in a row Robbins Geller tops the list. And in those three years alone, Robbins Geller recovered nearly $5.3 billion for investors, more than double the amount recovered by any other plaintiffs’ firm. The Firm secured the largest-ever securities fraud class action settlement — $7.2 billion — in In re Enron Corp. Securities Litigation.

For media inquiries, please contact media@rgrdlaw.com or call (619) 338-3821.

In re Facebook, Inc. Sec. Litig., 84 F.4th 844 (9th Cir. 2023).