A long-running lawsuit against Facebook’s parent, Meta, over the Cambridge Analytica scandal has ended after the company agreed to pay a settlement.

According to a court filing, Meta has agreed in principle to settle for an undisclosed sum over claims it illegally shared data on millions of its users with Cambridge Analytica.

The move comes ahead of a planned questioning of the company’s head, Mark Zuckerberg, along with outgoing chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg on September 20th.

As such, the settlement means that the two will not be called to testify as part of the suit.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light in early 2018 after a whistleblower revealed that the company illegally harvested and misused Facebook data to influence public votes.

The data analytics company used information sourced from up to 87 million Facebook profiles to influence both the 2016 US Elections and the Brexit Referendum

In the wake of the scandal, Facebook lost around $50 billion of its value, Cambridge Analytica filed for bankruptcy, and Zuckerberg said Facebook would increase transparency and introduce regulations on how the platform is used by political campaigns.

The move to settle the dispute has been touted as a way to keep Zuckerberg from testifying on the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

A lawsuit from September last year alleges that Facebook, as Meta was called then, overpaid a settlement to the US Federal Trade Commission by $4.9 billion in order to keep Zuckerberg from being named in a complaint.

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Earlier this year, Zuckerberg was sued personally by the US District of Columbia over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The latest filing has asked the US federal judge to put the lawsuit on hold for 60 days to give both sides to prepare written settlements.

According to the suit, he was personally liable for the data scandal as he helped create the data-sharing framework, despite its potential dangers, and joined in decision-making around the practice.

These claims, the suit maintained, were backed up by documents that connect Zuckerberg with the decision-making process on Cambridge Analytica.

This also marked the first time that Zuckerberg was personally sued over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

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