Facebook employee warned it used deeply wrong ad metrics to boost revenue

Some Facebook employees believed they were promoting “deeply wrong” data about how many users advertisers could reach, and one warned that the company had counted on “revenue we should have never made” based on its inflated numbers, according to recently unsealed internal emails.

The Financial Times reported the statements today based on a newly unredacted filing from a 2018 lawsuit in California. The lawsuit claims that Facebook knowingly overestimated its “potential reach” metric for advertisers, largely by failing to correct for fake and duplicate accounts. The filing states that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged problems with the metric in 2017, and product manager Yaron Fidler proposed a fix that would correct the numbers....

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