We Demand Criminal Investigations Of Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Other Facebook Executives

Dear Attorney General Garland, Chairwoman Khan, and Chairman Gensler,

We write to ask you to open a criminal investigation into Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and other relevant Facebook executives. Numerous and damning reports on company documents indicate Facebook seems to routinely violate the laws your offices are empowered to enforce.

Facebook executives including Zuckerberg and Sandberg have privately discussed plans to deceive investors, regulators, and clients in building their empire. Documents from two investor lawsuits provide “smoking gun” evidence that Facebook leaders seem to have knowingly, intentionally, and chronically violated the law. These scandalous revelations are also supported in documents released by the whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Millions of advertisers took Facebook at its word when making decisions about how to spend money – and we now have a trove of evidence suggesting Facebook knowingly lied to win that business. We ask you to act on that evidence.

Some of us are direct victims of Facebook's likely fraudulent activities. Some of us have been indirectly injured as Facebook used ill-gotten gains to overpower and undermine the local institutions our communities rely upon for honest information and healthy local commerce. All of us live in a world shaped disproportionately by Facebook – a company that once seemed like a modern success story, but which today appears built on flagrant and pervasive criminal activity.

You are entrusted with the vital work of holding corporations and powerful individuals accountable to the law when they violate it. Your predecessors have allowed white-collar crime to go unchecked for years. You have an opportunity to reverse that trend. The alarming and damning evidence that has already come to light about Facebook provides an opportunity to send a clear message that no one, no matter how powerful, is above the law.

Signed,