Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

This doesn't surprise me at all. I've run a few, albeit very small, campaigns on FB. I set up targetting (occupation and geography) and I would get people outside of my target 'liking' my ad. I'd reach out anyways to ask if they are interested in my product and they would never respond. I oftened wondered if they were just fake/bot accounts to make it look like my ads were getting attention. I'm glad some company has taken them to court to determine what is really going on.

As a med student, my ads are 90% ads for Caribbean med schools, nursing schools, and online nurse practitioner degrees that can be completed part time in under a year or two (these are the most worrying).

They target me about as well as a celebrity pitch.

I seem to recall some thing about when major companies pulled their advertising from YouTube over affiliation with hate speech, some notice that their sales did not decline. Does anyone know how advertising impact is measured online? It seems like a leap of faith every time.

I know everyone loves to hate Facebook and articles that confirm that bias are very popular right now, but this lawsuit doesn't seem to have smoking gun evidence like the headline suggests. Have you ever written an e-mail or Slack message to a peer complaining that something at your company might not be working well? Or that something is totally broken and you think it should be prioritized in the ticket queue? Imagine those statements being cherry-picked and used to argue that your entire company is a fraud. That's essentially what's happening here.

The quoted e-mail is from 2016, and includes questions like this:

> That manager proceeded to suggest further examination of top targeting criteria to “see if we are giving advertiser [sic] false hope.”

You'd think that if they concluded that they were giving advertisers false hope, the lawyers would have simply quoted that discussion, rather than an earlier discussion where a manager was asking for further investigation to make sure they weren't giving advertisers false hope. That is, doing their job to check that the ad targeting was proper.

The originators of the lawsuit are angry that their ads were shown to people who didn't have college degrees and did not make over $250,000 per year:

> Investor Village said in court filings that it decided to buy narrowly targeted Facebook ads because it hoped to reach “highly compensated and educated investors” but “had limited resources to spend on advertising.” But nearly 40 percent of the people who saw Investor Village’s ad either lacked a college degree, did not make $250,000 per year, or both, the company claims. In fact, not a single Facebook user it surveyed met all the targeting criteria it had set for Facebook ads, it says.

It's not clear if Facebook explicitly knew at the time that the ad targets didn't meet the criteria, or if Facebook's targeting data was simply incorrect for those who were targeted. Again, if they had evidence that Facebook was deliberately showing ads to people who they knew didn't meet the criteria, you'd think the lawyers would have led with that evidence instead of digging deep into old e-mails where managers proposed investigating the ad performance.

I know Facebook is the quintessential evil tech company in the 2020 zeitgeist, but it looks to me that these lawyers are trying to use that to their advantage to win a court case, not that they've stumbled upon some smoking gun.

guessing that if anyone understands bullshit it's ad buyers; if they're on fb it's because it has higher ROI than other platforms for their specific campaigns, not because they believe the hype

(of course if actual fraud took place fb should give back the money they collected)