The plaintiffs don't care, nor should they. When I go to a restaurant and order a hamburger, if the server brings me a tuna melt I send it back. It doesn't matter why the server brought me a tuna melt. Facebook is essentially saying that even though they wrote hamburger on the menu, and accepted my order for a hamburger, I should have known they meant a 41% chance of a hamburger and a 59% chance of something else because taped underneath my seat is a 15,000 word Restaurant Use Agreement printed on microfiche.
Here's a specific example: we ran around $1k in ads last year, targeting senior-level engineers at technology companies, but the ads were getting liked by mostly people who worked minimum-wage jobs. Twitter and LinkedIn targeting were fine with pretty much the same parameters.
This is one example, obviously, but it's so trivial to see that targeting is almost completely uncorrelated with reality, that it's not hard to come up with more examples.
Our general rule is if the product doesn't have broad appeal, you don't run it on FB.
My running theory on all ad networks is pretty simple. There are a very small subset of users, 25%-30%, of people who are regular purchasers and these companies know that based on conversion data. They generally just throw your ad in front of these people and let it ride.
While sure it sounds like you were ripped-off, I would expect that just about any mass-market medium offering ad-targeting to "senior-level engineers at technology companies", "senior managers", "wealthy yachting enthusiasts" or similar super-high-value clients be a ripped-off if it was offered. I'd imagine anyone in the position would avoid anything that could target them with ads (blocking ads, going incognito, avoiding social media, etc)because otherwise they'd be continuously barraged by companies.
Talking about (inadvertent) misquotes: the quote was attributed to a "February 2016 internal memorandum sent from an unnamed Facebook manager to Andrew Bosworth, a Zuckerberg confidant and powerful company executive who oversaw ad efforts at the time [...]". (Italic emphasis is mine)
People are finally coming around to what eBay learned a while ago.
Consider the following: if Facebook knows its targeting is ineffective and doesn't meet the criteria, why would they put that in writing, knowing that anything on writing can be subpoenaed?
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.