Facebook is trying really hard to plug the holes in its ever more leaky, giant corporate ship.
Faced with yet another big challenge to the shaken public perception of its integrity as a social media platform serving billions of people, the company has now turned to a US court in a bid to prevent more damning information emerging, after thousands of new documents had been leaked.
Facebook is now going after the alleged sources of the leaks, two figures from the Six4Three tech firm, asking the court to question and if need be, jail them, Computer Weekly has reported.
The publications is among several media outlets in Europe and the US with whom British investigative reporter Duncan Campbell has shared the leaked documents that he has been given access to. The same trove of confidential Facebook material was used in the investigation of the UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee in late 2018, worse report, as Computer Weekly noted, ended up describing Facebook as “digital gangsters.”
Campbell had gained access to the documents the day DCMS published its report.
Facebook’s lawyers have told the US court that Six4Three – involved in a previous legal dispute with the social media giant – said the DCMS gained the initial quantity of Facebook files, about 3,500, by legally seizing them from Six4Three founder Ted Kramer – an explanation that Facebook rejects as a possibility.
But both Kramer and Scaramellino have denied “any contact” with Duncan Campbell.
Now Facebook wants Kramer and the company’s lawyer Thomas Scaramellino questioned and/or jailed, to find out how over 3,000 more documents in the meantime found their way to the media.
Campbell, in turn, has had a few choice words for the tech giant when he said that Facebook was “concealing material information from the court” and “misleading the judge.”
“Facebook is trying to leverage the court to frighten and try to identify journalism sources,” Campbell said.
Computer Weekly also cited from Facebook’s filing which stated the company was “receiving with every passing day fresh information from the media that the leaks go broader and deeper.”
One of the revelations from the same massive document leak which other media outlets have had access to says that Facebook employed sensitive private data of its users to further its business by rewarding allies and punishing enemies – either by providing or withholding access to the user data it had collected.
