Facebook admits to miscalculating more of its advertising metrics - Was Used in Fake News Stories
Facebook admits to miscalculating more of its advertising
metrics
By Alex Heath December 9, 2016
Facebook revealed that it has been miscalculating more of
its viewership metrics for advertisers in a blog post on Friday.
One miscalculation is a discrepancy between the number of
likes and shares Facebook shows for web links through its Graph API for
advertisers and mobile search field.
Facebook has also been miscalculating the number of likes
and reaction emojis that page owners see for their live videos.
This is the third time Facebook has admitted to
misleading advertisers since September, when it was revealed that the social
network had been inflating a key video-viewing metric for years.
Neither of the errors Facebook revealed on Friday are as
impactful for advertisers as the previously misreported numbers for video views
and other products like Instant Articles.
But the discrepancy between the number of likes and
shares for web links could affect the accuracy of recent, widely cited
investigations by BuzzFeed and The New York Times into how fake news stories
are shared on Facebook, according to Marketing Land's Tim Peterson. Both
investigations relied on Facebook's like and share data to show how fakes news
stories can easily go viral on the social network.
Facebook said on Friday that it's still "looking
into" the discrepancy. The company recently acquired CrowdTangle, a tool
used by media outlets to measure how stories are shared across Facebook and
other social networks.
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