According to a newly public filing in an ongoing lawsuit, a group of advertisers now says that Facebook has been willfully withholding information about how much time its users spend watching paid ads—if more people spend more time watching ads, then those ads can command higher rates.
The case of LLE One LLC et al. v. Facebook was filed two years ago, is currently pending in federal court in Oakland, California, and was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. In it, the plaintiffs say that, as part of the discovery from their lawsuit, they have learned that Facebook’s “action rises to the level of fraud and may warrant punitive damages.”
As the plaintiffs’ attorneys continued: