Remembering Facerbook's Video Semi?-Fraud
Jason #StayHome Kint: The industry and publishers chased Facebook’s news, learning only later they may have been fraudently deceived... https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1263762461271998466. Since Facebook was gifted global news headlines yesterday by prognosticating on work from home 5-10yrs from now, a reminder Facebook is supposed to be “mostly video” this year.... It was one of the long list of reasons not to trust Facebook. Did Facebook’s faulty data push news publishers to make terrible decisions on video? Publishers' "pivot to video" was driven largely by a belief that if Facebook was seeing users, in massive numbers, shift to video from text, the trend must be real...
Laura Hazard Owen (2018): Did Facebook’s Faulty Data Push News Publishers to Make Terrible Decisions on Video? https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/did-facebooks-faulty-data-push-news-publishers-to-make-terrible-decisions-on-video/: ‘Publishers’ “pivot to video” was driven largely by a belief that if Facebook was seeing users, in massive numbers, shift to video from text, the trend must be real.... “The best way to tell stories, in this world where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn continued. “It commands so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually, the trend helps us to digest more of the information, in a quicker way.” “Five years to all video” wasn’t just Mendelsohn’s line—it came from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself.... The Wall Street Journal reported in September 2016, three months after the Fortune panel, that Facebook had “vastly overestimated average viewing time for video ads on its platform for two years” by as much as “60 to 80 percent.” The company apologized in a blog post: “As soon as we discovered the discrepancy, we fixed it.” A lawsuit filed by a group of small advertisers in California, however, argues that Facebook had known about the discrepancy for at least a year—and behaved fraudulently by failing to disclose it.... The court case was unsealed this week.... We may not be able to pinpoint exactly what Facebook knew when.... Facebook employees are quoted, but the quotes aren’t attributed. Without viewing the source emails or reports, we don’t know the context of what was said, and we don’t know who, for instance, said the company decided to “obfuscate the fact that we screwed up the math”— as it a junior coder or (probably not) Mark Zuckerberg? We don’t know from the filing how far up the food chain the discussion of errors went...
#journamalism #noted #publicsphere #2020-05-27
