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Andrew Forrest has been fighting Meta in courts on 2 continents for years. On April 17, the Australian mining billionaire took the most consequential step yet in that campaign, asking a US federal judge to strip Facebook's parent company of the legal immunity that has so far kept the case from going to a jury.
A hearing at the US District Court for the Northern District of California in Silicon Valley focused on a claim that goes beyond the original allegations of fake advertising: Forrest's legal team argued that Meta destroyed critical evidence shortly after being placed on notice to preserve it, and that this destruction should cost the tech giant its central legal defence.
"This is the first case brought in any court, but in particular in California where a verdict can resonate that says Facebook was never intended to get the benefit of this immunity for their advertising business," Forrest's attorney Simon Clarke told AFP after the hearing.
Judge P. Casey Pitts, who previously declined to dismiss the case, is expected to rule on Forrest's motion in the coming weeks.
What Forrest says Meta destroyed
The evidentiary claim at the centre of Thursday's hearing is stark. Forrest's legal team alleges that Meta failed to preserve the final versions of nearly 30,000 scam advertisements that used his name and image, despite receiving a letter in August 2019 warning of impending litigation and demanding that all data relating to those ads be preserved.
According to US legal filings, Meta's databases continued auto-deleting records even after that warning. As a result, Forrest now cannot show what the fraudulent ads actually looked like on screen, or how Meta's own systems altered the original content before it was served to users.
That last point is central to his legal theory. Forrest is not simply arguing that bad actors placed scam ads on Facebook. He is arguing that Meta's artificial intelligence tools actively optimised and personalised those ads before distributing them to users most likely to engage — making Meta a participant in the fraud rather than an innocent host of third-party content. Without the deleted data, he says, he cannot rebut Meta's argument that any wrongdoing came entirely from rogue advertisers who slipped through the company's systems.
The sanctions Forrest is seeking are designed to close that gap. His team is asking Judge Pitts to find that Meta violated federal evidence preservation rules; to strip Meta of its ability to rely on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as a shield against the claims; to prohibit Meta from arguing that evidentiary gaps are Forrest's problem; and to instruct any future jury that they may assume Meta's ad targeting tools were operating at full capacity on the scam ads for which detailed records no longer exist.
Meta has countered that the offending ads were not its doing and that it made reasonable efforts to preserve the relevant data.
What Section 230 means and why it matters here
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is one of the most consequential provisions in US internet law. It holds that providers of "interactive computer services" cannot be treated as publishers of content created by third parties. In practice, it has served as a near-complete defence for social media platforms against lawsuits arising from user-generated posts, messages and, in Meta's case, advertisements placed by external advertisers.
Forrest's case is built on the argument that Meta's role in shaping, targeting and profiting from the scam ads takes it outside the protection of that provision. Judge Pitts has already found that argument plausible enough to survive Meta's motion to dismiss. In an earlier ruling, he noted: "Forrest argues that Meta profited more from the ads featuring his image than they would have otherwise." The judge found that this was sufficient to establish that Meta may have actively benefited from the misappropriation, opening the door to further proceedings.
Forrest's team is now using a legal strategy that mirrors one deployed successfully in separate litigation against Meta. Earlier in 2026, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for harming a user through the addictive design of their platforms rather than just the content that appeared on them. The jury found that the companies were negligent in how they designed and operated their systems, and that this negligence was a substantial factor in causing harm to the plaintiff. By framing Meta's advertising infrastructure as the problem rather than individual scam ads, Forrest's legal team is attempting a similar navigation around Section 230's protections.
The Australian chapter
Forrest's pursuit of Meta began in Australia, where he took the more aggressive route of seeking criminal charges. He argued that Meta's continued operation of an advertising system that profited from scam content amounted to recklessly dealing with the proceeds of crime. The case was unprecedented: no major technology platform had previously faced criminal prosecution in Australia over deceptive advertising.
Australian prosecutors dropped those charges in early 2024, citing insufficient evidence. The US civil case survived that setback and has since moved into its current, more advanced phase, with the evidentiary motion now before Judge Pitts representing the most significant procedural development to date.
The billionaire behind the battle
Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest is the founder and executive chairman of Fortescue Metals Group, the iron ore producer he built from scratch in 2003 into one of the world's largest miners. Forbes estimates his net worth at approximately $16.6 billion, making him one of Australia's 2 or 3 wealthiest people. He received an AO (Officer of the Order of Australia) for services to business and to the community.
In recent years he has repositioned Fortescue from a pure iron ore play into a green energy and green hydrogen company, spending billions on renewable energy projects, electric mining equipment and hydrogen infrastructure across Australia, the United States, Norway and Brazil. He has also committed significant attention to Africa, where Fortescue has pursued a range of energy and resource investments with varying degrees of success.
In Gabon, Fortescue moved with unusual speed: it signed an agreement, established operations and shipped iron ore within roughly a year, making Gabon its only African venture to produce a tangible, sellable result to date. Elsewhere on the continent, Forrest's ambitions have been harder to convert. His most striking African aspiration — to help develop the Grand Inga hydropower complex in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a project capable of generating up to 40 gigawatts — collapsed by May 2024 when Congolese authorities confirmed Fortescue was out of the revised scheme. In Kenya, a 2022 framework agreement to build a 300-megawatt green ammonia plant using the country's geothermal resources remains at early-stage planning. Several other memoranda of understanding across the continent have yet to translate into operational projects.
