Facebook Under Fire for 2 Years of Inflated Video View Data

Some Olympic sports, like gymnastics and diving, eliminate competitors’ lowest scores, and it appears that Facebook took a similar approach in its data on average viewing time for videos over the past two years.

Some Olympic sports, like gymnastics and diving, eliminate competitors’ lowest scores, and it appears that Facebook took a similar approach in its data on average viewing time for videos over the past two years.

Suzanne Vranica and Jack Marshall of The Wall Street Journal reported that the social network disclosed the glitch in a post on its advertising help center several weeks ago, admitting that it only included video views of more than three seconds, which artificially inflated its data for average time watching videos, and Facebook said in a statement to the two reporters:

We recently discovered an error in the way we calculate one of our video metrics.

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