Facebook Under Investigation For Covering Up Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Dhir Acharya - Mar 19, 2019

The Guardian said federal prosecutors claim that Facebook has “covered up” the level to which it is closely related with Cambridge Analytica.

US-based federal prosecutors are investigating to find out if Facebook top executives were aware of data collection in the Cambridge Analytica scandal back in 2018.

A Sunday report from The Guardian said federal prosecutors conducted an investigation which has led to claims that Facebook has “covered up” the level to which it is closely related with Cambridge Analytica.

According to the report, in summer 2016, there have been claims that the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie at the Facebook office of board members. The meeting took place at the same time when the data company began working for Trump’s election campaign.

For the past one year, the social giant has been consistently denying being aware of Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of almost 87 million users’ data. The data collection reportedly aimed at targeting users with political bias through Facebook posts during the 2016 US Presidential election.

A spokesperson of Facebook spoke to The New York Times that the company is working with investigators and considers the probes critical issues.

Top prosecutor of Washington DC, back in 2018, sued the social network as the first noticeable move to punish the company for the role it played in the Cambridge Analytica data breach.

Karl Racine, Attorney General for the District of Columbia, filed a lawsuit which alleged Facebook of allowing wholesale scraping of private information affecting tens of millions of users.

In addition, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, and the US Security and Exchange Commission are also investigating the social giant.

Facebook had to pay a 500,000-pound fine in the UK over the Cambridge Analytica data breach.

In the last few days, the social network has also been under criticism for not acting fast enough to delete the video of New Zealand shooting, which killed almost 50 people. The company then reportedly removed 1.5 million videos of the mass shooting.