Facebook may lose seal of approval that gives ad buyers confidence they get what they buy in advertising, WSJ reports

[xeni]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/01/facebook-may-lose-seal-of-appr.html

Media rating council says Facebook could be denied accreditation

[Weasel-Rah]

All that Wish advertising catching up to them?

[fredtal]

Who ever is buying the ads I see, isn’t getting their money worth. Grocery stores in other states, some kind of scam involving cheap greenhouses. I don’t help FB with much information, but they aren’t even close to being relevant.

[apalatn]

My heart bleeds for both sides of this…

[nixiebunny]

Ads are the one thing that FB really cares about, so it’s amusing that they have screwed this up so badly.
Wait a moment while I get out my violin out of its case…

[James_Lovette-Black]

Talk’s cheap - let’s see that seal yanked.

[Melted_Crayons]

FB has a way to go before they get to TicketBastard level of consumer dislike, but I suspect their ethics aren’t too dissimilar. May the company die a continuous slow death.

[byron_p]

I am truly hoping the FB can be nickled and dimed to death.

[Chthon]

My understanding is that the root of the matter is that Facebook has been hemorrhaging human users (in developed countries at least) for several years, so they’ve been adjusting their metrics to purposefully misclassify an ever-growing number of non-human users (fake followers, Russian disinfo bots, alt accounts for playing farmville, etc.) as human in order to make it look like they’re still growing. Consequently, when an advertiser pays for their ad to be seen by X million people, only a fraction – and an ever-shrinking fraction – of those “people” are real humans. A darkly comical side effect is that Facebook claims to have a much larger audience in some demographics than the census numbers for those demographics. See here and here for instance.