Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants the Biden administration to open criminal and civil investigations into Facebook allegedly misleading customers about the reach of its advertisements.
The Massachusetts Democrat wrote on Thursday to Attorney General Merrick Garland and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler to open the probes to determine if Facebook, which has reorganized as Meta, violated wire fraud and securities laws.
“Facebook is not above the law,” Ms. Warren wrote in the letter. “The company’s executives cannot mislead investors, the SEC, its advertising customers, and the public about a core metric of its business model with impunity if such actions violate federal wire fraud or securities laws. Given the allegations of such misconduct, I urge the DOJ and SEC to immediately commence investigations into Facebook’s representations with respect to Potential Reach and, if you find that the company has in fact violated wire fraud or securities laws, to pursue all available criminal and civil sanctions as appropriate.”
Ms. Warren described potential reach as an estimate of how many people using Facebook may see a given ad and she argued that “evidence has mounted suggesting that high-level executives at Facebook may have known the Potential Reach metric was meaningfully and consistently inflated.”
Facebook and the SEC did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Justice Department declined to comment.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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