Facebook sued for overstating advertising reach – court expanded the pool of plaintiffs to include more than 2 million small ad buyers

Dismissing what he called a “blunderbuss of objections” by the company, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the case can proceed as a class action on behalf of small business owners and individuals who bought ads on Facebook or Instagram since Aug. 15, 2014.

The decision is another setback for the social networking giant after court filings in 2021 revealed that its audience-measuring tool was known by high-ranking Facebook executives to be unreliable because it was skewed by fake and duplicate accounts.

LinkedIn is facing a suit accusing it of inflating video-viewing metrics to lure and overcharge advertisers. Snap Inc., the parent of the Snapchat social-media app, was sued in 2017 by a former employee who claimed the company was inflating growth metrics ahead of its initial public offering.

The moral of it seems to be that where the social network (business) is driven by profit, then those metrics are going to be maxed out. “For years, Facebook repeatedly confronted a choice between telling customers the truth or preserving its revenue: at every turn, Facebook chose its revenue,” lawyers for the ad buyers said in a court filing.

I logged into my mom’s FB account this week to delete it this week (she has not used it in over two years), and a quick glance at the friends showed also no posts for months to a year plus, apart from one younger family member who seemed to still have posted a month ago.

MySpace at least died a lot quicker, but that death was driven by its users deserting it for a new, better platform. Our challenge in 2022 is we have too many alternatives, but better to choose a federated platform, than another walled garden like Facebook.

See https://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/439268-facebook-sued-for-overstating-advertising-reach.html

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