Judge Orders Meta to Review Privilege Claims: The Federal Trade Commission recently revealed that Facebook’s parent firm Meta had made the “shocking” admission that half of their sampled privilege claims were “unfounded.”
A federal judge took action on Monday afternoon in response to the revelation, directing Judge Orders Meta to Review Privilege Claims, Meta’s attorneys to review 2,500 entries of privilege claims by the end of January.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg disagreed with Meta’s attorneys when they described the request as “inappropriate” and “burdensome,” calling the FTC’s suggestion “reasonable” during a telephone conference. He didn’t agree with Meta’s argument that the privilege designations ought to stay in place in order to meet the upcoming discovery date of January 5, 2023.
“I just feel that saying ‘It doesn’t matter what you find.’ is premature. Right, here is the end of the road. stated Boasberg.
Following the judge’s oral decision made during a quick phone conference on Monday, regulators now have another chance to obtain a sizable number of the records they say Meta “wrongfully” withheld.
In a five-page submission on Nov. 23, Daniel Matheson from the FTC’s bureau of competition stated, “The FTC is seriously concerned by evidence that Meta is wrongfully concealing tens of thousands of probative documents based on baseless claims of privilege.”
Two Years Ago Facebook Was Sued By The Ftc On The Grounds That It Was A Monopoly Operating In Silicon Valley.
The FTC sued Facebook almost two years ago, alleging that the Silicon Valley behemoth was operating as a “monopoly.” Judge Boasberg advanced the action earlier this year, and soon after the case entered the discovery phase, Meta was the only defendant.
The FTC pointed out that less than 1% of the company’s privilege claims were represented by its request for Meta to evaluate 2,500 privilege entries pertaining to important witnesses.
Geoffrey M. Klineberg, the attorney for Meta, expressed dissatisfaction with regulators’ lack of reciprocal burden.
He stated: “This kind of last-minute, nonspecific, sweeping demand is utterly wrong, and the Court should reject it out of hand” in his written submission from last week.
Additionally, he mentioned that the request coincides with the holiday season.
The complaint said that the FTC’s request that Meta speed up the re-review of 2,500 Log entries during the winter holidays was unreasonable since it was out of context and unnecessarily burdensome.
Boasberg accepted the company’s lawyers’ request for a more lenient timeline than the FTC’s suggested completion date of January 9, 2023. By the end of December and the end of January, he claimed, Meta could examine the first half.
The FTC has filed two antitrust complaints against Facebook. According to regulators, Facebook bought rivals and potential rivals like Instagram and WhatsApp in order to crush competition for personal social networking services. They also assert that Facebook put in place rules that made it impossible for them to work with other apps that the company saw as potential threats.
Before the FTC modified the case, Boasberg dismissed a previous iteration of the claim. The judge presumably found the second version to be acceptable because he began his judgment in the FTC’s favor with the jocular phrase, “Second time lucky?”
The court stated in its decision earlier this year that “the underlying basis of the litigation remains substantially unchanged. He also added that the FTC had expanded upon its initial allegations by alleging “much more solid and comprehensive” evidence.
