Why Nobody Can Trust Facebook

'Can you imagine the horseshit they feed their credulous clients in private?'

CreateSend: It becomes harder and harder to overstate the corruption and treachery of the online ad industry. Lord knows I've tried.

Among its other accomplishments, Facebook has become famous for its lunatic metrics and bizarre rationalizations.

You would think a company that built its business on the promise of putting sophisticated data to work for advertisers would have the sense not to release numbers that are patently ridiculous.

But time and again Facebook has undermined its credibility by making claims that are easily proven to be false, and then defended these claims with statements that are absurd.

This week it was reported that Facebook was claiming to reach 41 million Americans between the ages of 18-24. If Facebook reached every American between 18 and 24 they'd still be 10 million short. There are only 31 million of them.

But Facebook's ability to reach imaginary people isn't just limited to its home base here in the US. According to their metrics, they have also developed the amazing  technology to reach non-existent people all over the world.

Below is a chart from AdNews in Australia that sums up Facebook's "branded storytelling."

We are so used to bullshit from the online ad industry that this latest round of nonsense should surprise no one.

The online ad industry -- the most corrupt and fraud-laden medium anyone's ever seen -- famously gave us the wonderful acronym NHT for Non-Human Traffic. Now Facebook has given us NEP's -- Non-Existing People.

Facebook has been ridiculed all over the world for this obvious fakery. And they will pay the exact same price they've paid every time they've been found to be lying about their numbers -- nothing, nada, zilch. The marketing and advertising industries have reached a point of such exquisite incompetence that nothing any of these creeps does has any consequences. They are liars and we are fools.

I loved Facebook's explanation for their metrics:

    "They are designed to estimate how many people in a given area are eligible to see an ad a business might run. They are not designed to match population or census estimates."

There must be a planet on which that preposterous nonsense makes sense, but I'll be damned if I know where it is.

Is it any wonder Facebook is fighting to the bitter end to block 3rd party monitoring and auditing of its numbers? If the numbers they brazenly release to the public are this dishonest, can you imagine the horseshit they feed their credulous clients in private?

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