Pivot to the Truth? Facebook Lied About Video Stats, Advertisers Say

Facebook knowingly inflated video ad metrics and lied to advertisers near it, according to a group of those advertisers.

As The Wall Street Journal reports, the advertisers, who sued Facebook in 2022 for overstating its metrics, now claim Mark Zuckerberg and Co. discovered that they'd been over-reporting the average corporeality of time users spent watching paid video ads in January 2022 but withheld that information for more than a year.

"Internal records recently produced in this litigation suggest…that Facebook'southward activeness rises to the level of fraud and may warrant punitive damages," the advertisers said in a Tuesday filing.

The controversy dates back to September 2022, when the Journal reported that Facebook had been overestimating average video advert viewing times for two years. Facebook claimed it calculated the "average duration of video viewed" by dividing the total time users' spent watching a video by the full number people who watched it. In reality, the visitor only included those who had viewed a video for three seconds or more when computing this metric, leaving out everyone who clicked away before iii seconds.

At the time, Facebook claimed it only discovered the trouble "about a calendar month" earlier and had fixed it right abroad. The advertisers, however, say otherwise.

"Facebook did not discover its mistake 1 month before its public proclamation," they wrote. "Facebook engineers knew for over a year."

The plaintiffs went on to say that "multiple advertisers had reported aberrant results caused by the miscalculation," merely the social network "did nix" to stop the spread of its wrong metrics.

Facebook did non immediately reply to PCMag'south request for comment but denied the allegations in a statement to the Journal.

"Suggestions that nosotros in whatsoever manner tried to hide this issue from our partners are imitation," a Facebook spokeswoman reportedly said. "We told our customers about the mistake when we discovered it—and updated our help center to explain the issue."

Meanwhile, the filing further claims that the problem was more than severe than previously reported. When the consequence came to light, Facebook said it overestimated average fourth dimension spent watching video ads by every bit much equally 60 to eighty pct. In their Tuesday filing, the advertisers say it's more similar "150 to 900 percent."

As a number of journalists have pointed out on Twitter today, video metrics from companies like Facebook prompted a number of media outlets to lay off print reporters and "pivot to video" in contempo years, a strategy that has yet to pay off.

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Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo is PCMag's expert on fitness and smart home products. Teaching yoga for nearly x years has helped her in evaluating a range of connected health products including fitness trackers, eye charge per unit monitors, rowers, smart scales, stationary bikes, strength training machines, treadmills, and more than. Angela also tests smart home devices from her ranch in Florida, including air purifiers, kitchen appliances, and robot vacuums, just to name a few.