woah exhibit 16. more Facebook docs quietly unsealed yesterday – it gets worse. A full, damning senior execs’ email thread (CFO, COO) unsealed. Facebook slowed unsealings in this fraud case and spun it as “cherrypicking.”
Top marketing exec, Carolyn Everson, weighs in here. /1 pic.twitter.com/Zn51XNcKxn— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) April 25, 2021
It’s Called Fraud
As I have noted a few times, any in depth examination of Facebook would reveal systematic fraud.
Recently revealed emails uncovered in the fraud lawsuit against the social media network show Facebook was deeply aware that it was providing false information to advertisers, which seems to be a slam-dunk case of fraud.
Both Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandburg are famously “Hands On”, and this is at the core of their business.
They knew that they were defrauding advertisers, and they took their money anyway:
Carolyn Everson, one of Facebook’s most senior advertising executives, said the company had to “prepare for the worst” over claims that it overstated the potential reach of its advertisements, according to newly released court filings.
The world’s largest social network has been fighting a class-action lawsuit in California since 2018 over claims that its figure for its “potential reach”, which told advertisers how many people saw their ads, included duplicate and fake accounts.
Facebook has argued that the numbers were only estimates and that advertisers are charged for actual clicks and impressions, rather than for the potential reach of an ad.
But according to filings in the lawsuit that were unredacted over the weekend, Everson, the vice-president of Facebook’s global business group, wrote an email in 2017 that said the metric “clearly impacted [advertisers’] planning”.
“We are going to get really criticized for that (and justifiably so),” she said. “If we overstated how many actual real people we have in certain demos, there is no question that impacted budget allocations. We have to prepare for the worst here.”
………
The lawsuit, which was filed in northern California in 2018 by a small-business owner, alleges that Facebook executives knew the potential reach figure was “misleading” and took no action to correct it in order to “preserve its own bottom line”.
It points to research showing Facebook had suggested potential reach in certain US states and demographics that was greater than the actual populations in those geographies.
A Financial Times investigation in 2019 found similar discrepancies in Facebook’s ads manager, an online tool to help advertisers build campaigns, even though the company made some changes to its potential reach definition earlier that year.
They knew that the metrics were complete crap, and they tried to bury the information and continued to use the bad data to get paid.
Break out the cuffs, Ponch.