Meta Platforms, Inc.

According to the complaint, defendants made materially false and/or misleading statements, as well as failed to disclose material adverse facts about the company’s business, operations, and prospects. Specifically, defendants allegedly failed to disclose to investors:

(i) that throughout the class period, which spans from March 2021 (shortly before the Apple changes went into effect) to February 2022, defendants—including the most senior echelon of Meta’s upper management— misled investors about mitigation efforts that Meta was implementing to try and counteract the devastating impacts to Meta’s advertising business from Apple’s new privacy protections;
(ii) that Meta’s mitigation efforts were not adequately mitigating the headwinds to advertising revenue caused by the new privacy protections or otherwise making the iOS changes “manageable” for Meta’s advertising business;
(iii) by what order the order of magnitude the changes would hurt the ad business until February 2, 2022, when they admitted to a staggering $10 billion impact on revenue; and
(iv) that it was facing materially increasing competition from rival social media platform TikTok, causing Meta to steer users from its services like “Stories” to its “Reels” service.