Lawsuit: Facebook Fired Air Force Vet in Retaliation for Concerns About Company Snooping on Users

A Former Facebook employee and Air Force veteran is suing Facebook (now known as Meta) claiming that he was fired in retaliation for raising concerns about fellow employees accessing deleted user data and sharing it with law enforcement.

Business Insider reports that a former Facebook employee and Air Force veteran named Brennan Lawson is suing Facebook claiming that he was fired from the company in retaliation for raising concerns about Facebook employees accessing deleted user data. Lawson says he was hired in July 2018 to work on Facebook’s escalation team.

Lawson was in charge of viewing high-profile information flagged to the company by journalists, law enforcement, and the government and enforcing the platform’s content moderation guidelines. Lawson claims in 2019 that Mark Zuckerberg’s company introduced a protocol that allowed his team members to access Facebook Messenger data even if it had been deleted by a user.

Lawson’s lawsuit states: “Facebook had represented to users for years that once content was deleted by its users, it would not remain on any Facebook servers and would be permanently removed.”

The lawsuit further states that the protocol was used to access user data when law enforcement requested information on a suspect. “To keep Facebook in the good graces of the government, the Escalations Team would utilize the back-end protocol to provide answers for the law enforcement agency and then determine how much to share,” the lawsuit says.

Lawson alleges that he was targeted by management after questioning the legality of the protocol in a meeting and that the company used a pretext involving his grandmother’s hacked account to fire him.

Lawson said that his grandmother contacted him in 2019 about her Facebook account being hacked, and he promptly directed her case through the appropriate channels to restore her account, but Facebook alleges that he had not followed company protocol by typing his grandmother’s email address into an admin tool, leading eventually to his dismissal.

Read more at Business Insider here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com