Advertisers Claim Meta Inflated Facebook, Instagram Reach Numbers by 400%, Elon Musk Shares Report

Facebook and Instagram advertisers have claimed that Meta owes them damages worth over $7 billion. According to an article on Adweek from March 2024, shared by Tesla chief Elon Musk on X (previously Twitter), Facebook and Instagram have been accused of inflating their numbers by up to 400 per cent.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has paved way for advertisers to pursue legal action against Meta for damages due to inflated Potential reach metric (the number of people in an ad set’s target audience).

The report says that the advertisers claimed that the metric included social media accounts, which could be fake accounts or bots rather than genuine individual users.

X users have commented on Musk’s post raising concerns over the same, saying there were several bots and fake accounts on both Facebook and Instagram.

“Instagram is flooded with alphanumeric base64 gibberish accounts by the dozens in duplicity of any organic users they have. Facebook has always been a similar morass. They make no effort to disallow farmers from creating armies of non-accounts,” a user wrote.

“I agree with the inflated numbers. There is no way they have that many quality, active users. Otherwise the content will not be this bad,” another user responded.

Reports in May 2024 had said that Meta had removed millions of fake accounts across Facebook and Instagram after receiving a huge number of complaints. Meta had also announced that it removed millions of pieces of bad content across both the platforms.