Facebook Sued For Misleading Advertisers And Hiding It

Facebook has got into a lawsuit in which it was accused of misleading advertisers about how long users watch videos in average long before admitting it. In addition, it tried to turn the attention from this mistake.

In September 2016, the social giant said that there was an artificial inflation of a key metric, the total time users watched video divided by views, in two years as it only label videos as viewed if users let them play for more than three seconds. Since the social network did not count shorter views, but still count them to calculate total time watched, advertisers seem misled.

Facebook indicated that they fixed the calculations and decrease that metric’s importance.

Crowd Siren, an online marketing agency, complained on Tuesday that Facebook already discovered the metric in 2015.

It is also claimed by the agency that Facebook could not correct the error and committed deflecting public’s attention from the incident, which is shown on company’s documents and exchanged emails revealed by internal sources.

In a complaint that it amended, Crowd Siren accused Facebook of fraud and filed request for punishment to Oakland federal court, California.

In its response, Facebook sent an email in which it denied the lawsuit’s accusation and they have submitted document to dismiss the claims. In defense, Facebook spoke person said when it found out about the error, it informed customers and add explanation about the issue on its help center.

Bloomberg notes that Facebook’s growth relies on making advertisers believe that users are watching more videos on its site, and the social network is struggling to restore users’ faith after discovering evidence that Russians made use of Facebook to interfere US presidential election in 2016, as well as 29 million users got attacked and stolen of personal data.

Crowd Siren refused to make further comments.