As if Facebook didn’t have enough to deal with, now the company is facing a lawsuit from advertisers who allege that Facebook misrepresented its ad viewership metrics.
In 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook overstated the average viewing time for video ads and that the company disclosed the error through its advertiser help center a month prior. A lawsuit filed Tuesday, alleges that Facebook knew there were problems with the way it collected data on ads before then.
“Facebook’s internal efforts behind the scenes reflect a company mentality of reckless indifference toward the accuracy of its metrics,” the plaintiffs said in Tuesday’s filing.
Facebook told advertisers that it overstated its metrics by 60 to 80 percent, but plaintiff’s in Tuesday’s court filing alleged that the company misrepresented the metric by 150 to 900 percent.
Facebook denied any wrongdoings in a statement and has moved to dismiss the case.
“Suggestions that we in any way tried to hide this issue from our partners are false. We told our customers about the error when we discovered it—and updated our help center to explain the issue,” a Facebook spokeswoman said to the Wall Street Journal.
Facebook is now using third-parties to analyze its metrics in an effort to be more transparent with advertisers.
