A giant digital sign is seen on the campus of Facebook’s corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on October 23, 2019.
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Documents made public in court on Wednesday claim that Facebook executives rejected an employee who proposed changing an ad metric to make it more accurate, because they thought the change would impact revenue.
The documents come as part of an ongoing class action lawsuit, originally filed by a small business owner in 2018. They have to do with Facebook’s “potential reach” metric, which allows advertisers to see an estimated audience of how many people your campaign could potentially reach when setting bids and budgets. The unsealed deposit was first reported by the Financial Times.
According to the lawsuit, senior Facebook executives had known for years that their “potential reach” role was overstated and misleading, but that they did not act and actively tried to hide the problems. He said Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, acknowledged in an email in the fall of 2017 that she had known about problems with “Potential reach” for years.
The lawsuit says that “Potential reach” is misleading because it is described as a measure of “people” when, at best, it is a measure of accounts. He says Facebook has deliberately not removed duplicate or fake accounts from this metric. The suit also states that in early 2018 a Facebook analysis found that removing duplicate accounts from the reach creature would cause a 10% drop in numbers.
A product manager working on “Potential reach” allegedly proposed to change the metric so that it no longer included the words “people” or “Reach” and made it clearer that it was based on accounts. But the lawsuit says Facebook’s metrics leadership team rejected them “because Facebook’s ‘revenue impact’ would be ‘significant’.”
“As Potential Reach’s product manager said, ‘It’s the recipe we should never have made, given the fact that it’s based on wrong data,'” says the process. ‘Another employee said’Source