Mark Zuckerberg personally encouraged Cambridge Analytica to exploit the data of more than 70million Facebook users. That’s the scathing indictment that Washington D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine leveled at Facebook (now Meta) founder Mark Zuckerberg in a lawsuit filed against Zuckerberg today. Painting a picture of an enormous online empire spanning the globe, “Atop it all is Mark Zuckerberg, the unelected leader of a massive digital empire with billions of inhabitants” says the lawsuit.

Facebook has been sued by the Washington D.C. District Attorney for Facebook’s lax and improper handling of Facebook users’ data following last March’s privacy scandal in which Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest and use the personal information of 50 million Facebook users.

Following the revelations in the past week that political data analysis outfit Cambridge Analytica somehow managed to harvest the private data of more than 50 million Facebook users, and without the users being alerted, there have been increasing calls for Facebook users to leave Facebook for more secure climes.