Facebook released a set of emails on Friday showing that the company was questioning whether Cambridge Analytica was in violation of its policies as early as September 2015.
Facebook had been fighting the release of the documents as part of a lawsuit that the attorney general for Washington, D.C., filed last year over the social network’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which the firm used Facebook data to profile and target voters in the 2016 U.S. elections.
The two sides had reached an agreement this week to unseal the emails while keeping certain portions redacted to protect employees’ privacy.
The documents reveal internal discussions about Cambridge Analytica and other third parties among Facebook employees who said they were contacting the companies in question to probe their use of Facebook data and whether it was being used in ways that may violate Facebook’s policies.
The actual emails shed little light beyond what had been previously known about their contents. D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine’s office and the Securities and Exchange Commission both described them earlier this year in court filings.
