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Meredith Whittaker

@_dm Arguably fake users making fake content we click on, that clicks on us, is fraudulent traffic. And allegations of funny accounting, boring on/constituting fraud have been leveled at Meta for years. Since Meta owns the 'data' and the process of creating it, with almost no accountability, it's not clear to me that this is a bright line that won't be (hasn't already been) crossed.

@Mer__edith @_dm The buyers of advertisement own the most important metric: is the advertising worth the spend. Forget about clicks (unless you in turn are selling advertising - is this turtles all the way down?) how do your sales change based on advertising. Nobody should buy any ads without first figuring out how to calculate that metric on their own. Forget about the data the you get from the advertising vendor - it is irrelevant. What really matters is how does your bottom line change. Most of us it is good enough to just look at total sales for the month (though more complex campaigns might be about sales over the next 3 years) .

Clicks from ads is typically the wrong metric. Some people will click and not buy. Others will not click but later google your name and buy something. So what matters is the bottom line at the end of the month. Statisticians can use other data to figure out how much clicks affected the bottom line, but you need to be fairly big to afford the cost of a statistician to figure this out (remember their services reduce the bottom line!)