Facebook Ad Case Moves Towards Class Action Certification

Facebook is facing a lawsuit over the allegation that it was aware of inflated “potential reach” metrics which were used to determine ad pricing. An ad’s potential reach was supposedly the number of eyes that could possibly view the company’s ad. The suit alleges senior executives at Facebook were aware for years that this potential reach metric was inflated, and actively tried to cover it up because the company profited greatly from pricing its ads based on this flawed statistic. 

The suit is very similar to one brought against Linkedin for inflated pricing of ads. These social media platforms make most of their money from advertising, and consumers who purchase ads on these platforms rely on the companies to price the ads fairly based on their own self-reported metrics.

In the Linkedin case, the suit centered on the company’s knowledge of inflated interaction metrics due to misclicks or non-human activity. For Facebook, the inflation of potential reach was because the company’s metric treated each account as an individual person, when it is well known that there are many people with multiple accounts. 

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Because of the large number of ad customers affected, the plaintiffs have moved to certify this case as a class action lawsuit against the tech giant. Mitena Partners will monitor the case as it goes forward and will provide updates should the case obtain class action status. Be sure to follow our blog for the latest news on this and other cases like it.