Court documents: Facebook video stats deviated by up to 900 percent

The video stats Facebook displayed for the period around 2015 and 2016 did not differ by up to 80 percent, as the company said, according to new court documents, but by up to 150 to 900 percent.

According to the indictment, the prosecutors discovered the figures in documents that Facebook had to retrieve because of the upcoming lawsuit, The Wall Street Journal reports. Facebook admitted two years ago that it had made mistakes when measuring reach numbers, but then said much lower percentages that the numbers should be different.

In addition, Facebook is said to have known about the anomaly for more than a year before exposing the flaw and notifying advertisers. The company wouldn’t have done anything about it. The flaw, according to the indictment, was not malicious, and the failure to resolve the issue was due to the world’s largest social network appointing two engineers to fix problems with the video platform. As a result, it took much longer than intended.

Once the flaw was known internally, the company developed a “no PR strategy” to prevent users from “realizing that we screwed up the math,” the indictment said. Facebook says in a statement to The Wall Street Journal. “Suggestions that we’ve tried to hide this issue from partners in any way is incorrect. We told our customers about the bug when we discovered it and updated our help center to explain the problem.” It is unknown what the exact consequences have been of the overestimation.