Stefan Mileschin

A new lawsuit accuses Facebook of inflating ad-watching metrics by up to 900%. Facebook allegedly knew for over a year that its average-viewership numbers were wrong and simply remained quiet. Facebook then leveraged these lies to sell premium video advertising on its platform because advertisers thought the ads were being viewed for longer periods of time by Facebook users. The advertisers had initially filed an lawsuit in 2016, but Facebook documents released through the court process shined new light on the grievances. Of course Facebook released a statement downplaying the validity of the lawsuit "Suggestions that we in any way tried to hide this issue from our partners are false," the company said in a statement. "We told our customers about the error when we discovered it -- and updated our help center to explain the issue." Facebook knew by January 2015 that its video-ad metrics had problems, and understood the nature of the issue within a few months, but sat on that information for more than a year, the plaintiffs claimed in an amended complaint filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Oakland. "Even once it was decided to take action on the metrics, Facebook did not promptly fix its calculation or disclose that the calculation was wrong," the filing alleged. "Instead, it continued reporting miscalculated viewership metrics for another several months, as it developed a 'no PR' strategy to avoid drawing attention to the error. That "unethical, unscrupulous" behavior by Facebook constituted fraud because it was "likely to deceive" advertisers, the filing alleged.

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