The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday wrestled with a bid by Meta’s Facebook to throw out a federal securities fraud lawsuit brought by shareholders who accused the social media platform of misleading them about its misuse of user data.

The justices heard arguments in Facebook’s appeal of a lower court’s decision that allowed the 2018 class action lawsuit led by Amalgamated Bank to proceed. The lawsuit seeks, in part, unspecified monetary damages to recoup the lost value of Facebook stock in the hands of the investors. It’s one of two cases before them this month — the other involving chipmaker Nvidia on Nov. 13 — that could lead to rulings that make it harder for private litigants to hold companies accountable for alleged securities fraud.

The question is whether Facebook broke the law by failing to detail the earlier data breach in subsequent corporate risk disclosures, and instead portraying the risk of such incidents as purely hypothetical.

Facebook argued in a Supreme Court brief that it was not required to disclose the forewarned risk had already materialized because “a reasonable investor” would understand risk disclosures as forward-looking statements.

“When we think about these questions, we’re not just looking at lies or outright false statements,” liberal Justice Elena Kagan told Facebook’s lawyer Kannon Shanmugam. “We also look for misleading statements or misleading omissions.”

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito asked Shanmugam: “Isn’t it true that an evaluation of risk is always forward-looking?”

“It is. And that is essentially what underlies our argument,” Shanmugam replied.

Prosecutors accused Facebook of misleading investors in violation of the Securities Exchange Act, a 1934 federal law that requires publicly traded companies to disclose their business risks. They alleged that the company unlawfully withheld information from investors about a 2015 data breach involving British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica and affecting more than 30 million Facebook users.

Edward Davila, a U.S. District Judge, dismissed the lawsuit, but the San Francisco-based Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived the lawsuit. The Supreme Court’s ruling is expected at the end of June.

The Cambridge Analytica data breach prompted a U.S. government investigation into Facebook’s privacy practices, several lawsuits and a hearing in the U.S. Congress. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission brought an enforcement action against Facebook over the case in 2019, which the company settled for $100 million. Facebook paid a separate $5 billion fine to the US Federal Trade Commission over this issue.

The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Some conservative justices seemed to indicate that reasonable investors would read statements in forward-looking risk factors as outlining problems that may have occurred in the past.

“For example, if you were leaving my house and I said, ‘Maybe you’re sliding up the stairs,’ you wouldn’t say, ‘Well, that’s never happened before.’ Your conclusion would be: That happened and that’s why I’m giving you this warning,” John Roberts, the conservative chief justice, told Kevin Russell, a lawyer for the shareholders.

But Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas pressed Shanmugam on whether the company’s risk statement was misleading.

“The problem is that a reasonable person could look at the statement and assume that because it only speaks to the future likelihood of this harm or event occurring, it never occurred,” Thomas said. “So why couldn’t you read this and assume it never happened?”

Shanmugam replied: ‘We do not think that any reasonable person would draw that inference from a statement of this nature. Where a statement says ‘if something happens, harm may result’ – I don’t think it is a necessary premise of that statement that the event never happened.”

Facebook’s shares fell following 2018 media reports that Cambridge Analytica had used unlawfully collected Facebook user data in connection with Donald Trump’s successful 2016 US presidential campaign.