Facebook advertising chief issued warning over inflated audience figures
A top Facebook executive warned colleagues the company must “prepare for the worst” over claims it inflated figures on how many people its adverts could reach, court filings have revealed.
Carolyn Everson, vice president of the social media giant’s global business group, wrote in an email in 2017 that the company would be “justifiably” criticised over metrics that “clearly impacted [advertisers’] planning”.
“If we overstated how many actual real people we have in certain demos, there is no question that impacted budget allocations,” she wrote. “We have to prepare for the worst here.”
The documents were published as part of a class action lawsuit, filed in California in 2018, over claims Facebook inflated figures for the “potential reach” of adverts on its platform.
The tech giant has argued that the metric was only an estimate and did not affect how much advertisers actually paid, as this is determined by clicks and impressions.
But the lawsuit, which was filed by a small business owner and first reported by the Financial Times, alleges that Facebook bosses knew the numbers were “misleading” but wanted to “preserve its bottom line”.
The complaint is linked in part to the proliferation of duplicate and fake accounts on Facebook’s platform, which the suit argues were included in potential reach figures and therefore gave an inaccurate view of how many people would view an ad.
Documents previously filed as part of the court case show several other Facebook insiders had expressed concerns about the practice.
An one email an employee in charge of the potential reach metric said the company had made “revenue we should have never made given the fact [the metric is] based on wrong data”.
Facebook has hit back at the claims and insisted old emails were being “cherry-picked to fit the plaintiffs’ narrative”.