Mark Zuckerberg is a Lying Sack of Excrement, Part VMCMLXIX

Facebook lied about when it discovered Cambridge Analytica's misuse of its data.

This is not a surprise.

All evidence indicates that, at least until it got caught, Facebook did not care about how its data was used until it became a public relations debacle, because they still got their money:

Facebook knew about Cambridge Analytica's dodgy data-gathering practices at least four months before they was exposed in news reports, according to internal FB emails.

Crucially, the staff memos contradict public assurances made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as well as sworn testimony offered by the company.

Those emails remain under a court seal, at Facebook's request, although the Attorney General of Washington DC, Karl Racine, is seeking to have them revealed to all as part of his legal battle against the antisocial media giant.

Racine's motion to unseal [PDF] the files this month stated "an email exchange between Facebook employees discussing how Cambridge Analytica (and others) violated Facebook’s policies" includes sufficient detail to raise the question of whether Facebook has – yet again – given misleading or outright false statements.

The redacted request reads: "The jurisdictional facts in the document shows that as early as September 2015, a DC-based Facebook employee warned the company that Cambridge Analytica was a “[REDACTED]” asked other Facebook employees to “[REDACTED]” and received responses that Cambridge Analytica’s data-scraping practices were “[REDACTED]” with Facebook’s platform policy."

It goes on: "The Document also indicates that months later in December 2015, on the same day an article was published by The Guardian on Cambridge Analytica, a Facebook employee reported that she had '[REDACTED].'"

The reason this is critical is because Facebook has always claimed it learned of Cambridge Analytica's misuse of people's profile information – data obtained via a third-party quiz app built by Aleksandr Kogan – from press reports. Zuckerberg said in a statement more than two years later: "In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent, so we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform."

Zuck omitted, incidentally, that Facebook threatened to sue the newspaper if it published its story. Facebook also admitted today that its executives have claimed the same thing as their boss under oath – that the social network only learned about the data misuse from press reports.

………

The truth is that Facebook is a train wreck with executives encouraged to do whatever they wanted in order to secure Facebook's position in the digital economy and bring in revenue, regardless of laws or ethics or morals or anything else.

Its work culture is fundamentally broken with top executives making it plain that the company will obfuscate, mislead, block and bully before they even consider telling the truth – and that culture attracts more of the same.

Even by the notoriously lax ethical standards of the tech industry, Facebook is a particularly bad actor.