Vegas based social media marketing company Crown Siren is now claiming that Facebook mislead advertisers as early as 2015 about video metrics and then did everything they could to hide the truth from advertisers.
The group dubs itself LLE One and includes Las Vegas-based social media firm Crowd Siren and Social Media Models as well as defunct startup Quirky.
The group filed a lawsuit in California’s federal courts in 2016 and added a complaint Tuesday claiming that internal records suggest “Facebook’s action rises to the level of fraud.”
The new filing, based off of 80,000 pages of internal documents, claims that in September 2016 Facebook only had two engineers dedicated to fixing measurement errors.
The case stems from September 2016, when a report from The Wall Street Journal found that Facebook had miscalculated the time spent watching videos by 60% to 80%.
The report set off a stream of other metric miscalculations reported by Facebook and changes to how metrics were handled at the social-media company.
Facebook also set up a measurement council and began working with the Media Ratings Council to complete an audit of its metrics.
According to Bloomberg, “Facebook Inc.’s growth has hinged on convincing advertisers that people are watching more videos on its social network. The Menlo Park, California-based company is trying to regain trust after a series of revelations that hackers accessed intimate user information and the platform was manipulated by Russia to help Donald Trump win the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
