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A group of small advertisers is suing Facebook and says the social network was aware of erroneous calculations for a year before they were reported.
The group calls itself LLE One and includes Las Vegas-based Crowd Siren social media firm, as well as social media models, as well as the now-deceased Quirky start-up. The group filed a lawsuit in California's federal courts in 2016 and added a complaint Tuesday that internal records suggest that "Facebook's action is reaching the level of fraud." The plaintiff's case relies on approximately 80,000 pages of Facebook's internal files.
In response to the complaint, a spokeswoman for Facebook said: "This action is baseless and we filed a motion to dismiss these fraud charges.It is wrong to suggest that we try to hide this problem from our partners our customers about the error when we discovered it – and updated our help center to explain the problem. "
The case stems from September 2016, when a Wall Street Journal report revealed that Facebook had miscalculated the time spent watching videos by 60% to 80%. The report highlighted a stream of other metrics calculation errors reported by Facebook and changes in the way metrics were processed by the social media company. Facebook also set up a measurement council and began working with the Media Ratings Council to conduct an audit of its metrics.
According to the lawsuit, the video's statistics were inflated from 150% to 900%. The lawsuit also alleges that Facebook was aware of the metric disparity in July 2015.
In an internal response to such an investigation, a Facebook engineer discussed the numerator / denominator mismatch: "I remember [another Facebook engineer] When calculating the average, we only consider the views longer than three seconds, but we use the total standby time (including those under three). [seconds]), "says the lawsuit.
Marketers claim that Facebook was aware of metric errors in advance
According to the complaint, in June 2016, a Facebook engineer reportedly responded to a complaint filed by advertisers in 2015 regarding the average percentage of videos viewed. The engineer wrote that "there was no progress in the past year," and he continued to report on the metric for several months while using a "PR-free strategy" that avoided attracting attention. attention to the error, according to the prosecution.
LLE One also alleges that internal documents revealed that Facebook had never conducted a full audit of its video statistics until September 2016 and that the Video Insights team – which was tasked with investigating and reporting correct mistakes – only had two engineers dedicated to correcting errors.
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