Court Rules Facebook Faces $3.8 Billion In UK Mass Action

(CTN News) – A London tribunal ruled on Thursday that Facebook must face a collective lawsuit valued at around 3 billion pounds ($3.77 billion) over allegations that the social media giant abused its dominant position to monetise users’ personal data in order to make money.

According to Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, a professor of law at the University of Aberdeen who is taking up the case on behalf of approximately 45 million UK Facebook users, the value of the personal data that they had to provide has not been properly compensated.

According to her lawyers, she believes that Facebook should not be compensated for the economic value it would have been possible for users to receive if it didn’t hold a dominant position in the social networking market, and that consumers should not be compensated.

Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms Inc META.O, on the other hand, says the lawsuit is “entirely without merit” and its attorneys argue Facebook’s claim of economic loss ignores the economic value it provides to its users with its service.

In a decision handed down last year by the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT), Meta was apparently denied a go-ahead to continue its legal action.

As the CAT announced on Thursday, Gormsen has been granted the right to proceed with his case, as the revised claim brought forward by Gormsen’s attorneys has been allowed to move towards a trial.

Judge Marcus Smith indicated in a written ruling that a final hearing on this case could take place at the latest by the end of the first half of 2026, according to Judge Marcus Smith’s written ruling.

As a result, they added, “We are committed to giving people meaningful control over what information they share on our platforms, as well as with whom they share it, and we have already invested heavily in creating tools that allow people to do so.”

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