Wow. This is really terrible.

it looks like Facebook has gotten caught with their pants down on their accounting. However, do you remember the grumbling from several years back that revealed that no messages are ever actually deleted, just flagged in a database? (They made an update and tons of un-deleted messages appeared in people's inboxes)

Text data like dollars paid on XYZ account doesn't take up that much space. There's no reason every single one of these transactions doesn't actually exist in a DB.

Either the database people are not working with whoever is assigned to these tasks, compliance is being managed by morons who don't think to engage the database people, or stuff is not getting any direction from higher up and middlers are spinning their wheels. It'd be interesting to hear from some anonymous insiders closer to this stuff.

I’m starting to wonder if Facebook’s advertising data is just really poorly structured and they have no easy, consistent way for identifying ads about a particular subject. That wouldn’t make their sloppiness or non-compliance any more acceptable; it just makes me feel empathy for the likely harried entry-level Excel/SQL jockies who are trying to build these increasingly-visible reports while getting the double-whammy questions of “why was the last report wrong?” and “why doesn’t this new report tie to the last report we put out?”

Credibility — hard to win back once you’ve lost it.

Cut the bullshit. Don’t ask facebook, as the campaigns for the data. If Oliver paid more than $100, then she should be able to prove it by offering documentation.

Why are you shaking the wrong tree?

@4 you are really dumb for even asking this question dude, how much of this did you read?

#5 the article is about Facebook appearing to not fully disclose.

If you read into the article it’s stating there are wildly different disclosure amounts amongst all mayoral candidates, with the exemption of the Oliver campaign.

Oliver says they paid roughly 20X more in ad buys, prove it not only via filings, but actual screenshots of the ad buys. It’s not difficult to get hold of that info. All Oliver would have to do is look at the analytics on their campaign Facebook page.

With regard to Facebook offering up information. These disclore rules may take a bit of time to work out the bugs. They very well may have a data geek behind the wheel that sucks shit and needs to be in charge of pencil sharpening instead.

I do find it interesting that the Oliver campaign only showed up one ad buy, when there was more ads claimed in the filing. The fact it consistently came up as one filing while the other candidates have pretty wide discrepancies leads me to wonder if that money was actually misdirected to someone’s pocket.

Hopefully the author digs deeper into all the campaigns, , including Oliver’s.

#5 Thumbs got ahead of me. Facebook disclosures are wildly different from one to the other.

Curious why anyone thinks Facebook is even remotely dependable. You have to be an idiot to buy into it.

Does the author believe there’s some conspiracy against or in favor of one candidate over another?

I suspect the conspiracy is from the Oliver camp that big corporations conspired to get Durkan elected. By the tone of the piece it seems the author may be holding that view.