The documents feature internal Facebook communications in which managers appear to admit major flaws in the ad targeting features, including that the ads reached the target audience less than half the time they were shown and that the data behind a criteria of targeting were “crap”. Facebook says the material is presented out of context.
“More than half the time, we are showing ads to someone who is not the advertisers’ target audience.”
They emerged from a lawsuit that is currently seeking collective action certification in the federal court. The lawsuit was filed by the owner of Investor Village, a small company that operates a message board on financial topics. Investor Village said in lawsuits that he decided to buy Facebook ads strictly targeted because he hoped to reach “highly paid and educated investors”, but “had limited resources to spend on advertising”. But nearly 40% of people who saw the Investor Village ad did not have a college degree, earned $ 250,000 a year, or both, the company says. In fact, not a single Facebook user who searched met all of the targeting criteria he set for Facebook ads, he says.
The complaint presents documents from Facebook indicating that the company knew that its advertising capabilities were exaggerated and underperforming. An “February 2016 internal memo” sent by an unidentified Facebook manager to Andrew Bosworth, a Zuckerberg confidant and powerful executive at the company who oversaw advertising efforts at the time, says: “[I]The accuracy of interest in the U.S. is only 41% – this means that more than half of the time we show ads to someone who is not the target audience for advertisers. And it is even worse internationally. … We don’t think we’re meeting advertisers’ expectations of accuracy today. The process goes on to quote “unidentified employees from the Facebook ad team” discussing their targeting capabilities around June 2016:
An engineer celebrated that detailed targeting represented “18% of total ad revenue” and $ 14.8 million on June 17th alone. Using a smiling emoticon, an engineering manager replied: “I love this graphic! Although the most popular option is to combine interest and behavior, and we know for sure that our behavior is almost crap, it means that we are deceiving advertisers [sic] a little? 🙂 ”This manager started to suggest a deeper examination of the main targeting criteria to“ see if we are offering the advertiser [sic] false hope. “
“Interest” and “behavior” are two main facets of the data dossiers that Facebook compiles about us for advertisers; according to the company, the former includes things you like, “from organic foods to action films”, while the latter consists of “behaviors like previous purchases and use of devices”.
The complaint also cites unspecified internal communications in which “[p]In particular, Facebook managers described important segmentation data as ‘garbage’ and admitted that the accuracy was ‘abysmal’ ”.
Facebook said in its court documents that these quotes are presented out of context. The company tried to suppress the internal documents, obtained by the plaintiff in the judicial investigation process, on the grounds that they were “confidential” and could be harmful if competitors read them – an argument rejected by the court, which in November ordered the un-sealed filings with small newsrooms. The social network further argued, in its motion rejected to dismiss the lawsuit, that total accuracy in its targeting is never guaranteed, and that any sophisticated targeting claims that the plaintiff cited in his decision to buy Facebook ads were “generalized promotional statements about Facebook advertising that a reasonable consumer couldn’t trust as a guarantee of a specific accuracy rate. ”
“Facebook’s argument that its ad targeting regime is good for small businesses is not just selfish – it is totally wrong.”
The lawsuit comes at a difficult time for Facebook, which recently ran full-page ads in several national newspapers claiming that iOS’s new privacy safeguards will strangle small American businesses, which are already struggling with the economic cataclysm of the Covid- pandemic. 19. Facebook calls this anti-Apple effort the “Speak Up for Small” campaign. The Investor Village lawsuit suggests that, far from being a pandemic panacea, Facebook’s targeted ad targeting actually wasted the time and money of small advertisers it now says it is defending. “Facebook is not a friend of small businesses,” said Steven Molo, a lawyer who represents the claimant. “As detailed in the allegations of our class action on behalf of advertisers, Facebook has substantially misrepresented its ability to deliver ads accurately, to the dismay of its own employees.”
Although Facebook would like you to think not, your new fight with Apple is very simple. Historically, companies like Facebook have been able to monitor the way you use your iPhone (or iPad) to try to learn the details of your life on a large scale to – how the pitch was for advertisers, at least – to show their specific ads that reflect your hopes, desires, friendships, private moves, and so on. But beginning in 2021, Apple says that persistent surveillance will no longer be enabled by default; instead, iPhone owners would have to explicitly choose to be chased by their apps, cutting through this fire hose of deeply personal data. This is a major change in an industry where surveillance is a given, not an option.
According to Dipayan Ghosh – a former Facebook executive and current co-director of the Digital Platforms and Democracy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School Media, Policy and Public Policy Center – both Facebook’s anti-privacy public relations blitz and this new process has ironically led to a similar conclusion: Facebook is not friends with anyone, but Facebook. “Facebook’s argument that its ad targeting regime is good for small businesses is not just selfish – it is totally wrong,” Ghosh told The Intercept in an email. “In addition, the recent [Investor Village] complaint clearly indicates that, if anything, advertising on Facebook is not as effective for its advertising customers as it could be. The lack of transparency, coupled with the low-cost perception of advertising on Facebook, has bothered marketers for many years – and it seems that these perceptions may be true. “
Facebook was not immediately available for comment.