Maybe Facebook, Spotify, Twitter and the like are scamming Advertisers about interaction stats thanks to AI-powered Bots.
Otherwise, I can't explain why they don't take it more seriously to stand up to bots. Even more so with meta and their eagerness to put in more accounts pretending to be human to "cover the friend market".
Besides, what's to stop them? They are the ones who control the information and surely they know perfectly well which accounts are authentic and which are bots. Maybe even several of those accounts are controlled directly by them and they use them to inflate the statistics to charge advertisers even more.
They're definitely lying about the reach of their ads, this already came up a couple of times during elections. Though in the case of elections, it's more about the precision of their targeting - apparently, a lot of the time they weren't even able to precisely target the population of specific election districts. Or maybe just unwilling, who knows.
I'm also pretty sure that a lot of advertising clients are not happy that they're sharing ad space with porn ads and scam ads.
Annoying as shit. My girlfriend doesn't have an ad-less youtube app on her phone, and whenever we watch a video on her phone I get genuinely annoyed by the ads.
I've offered to do it for her but so far she doesn't see the need to install one, but apparently youtube is pushing more ads cause she recently started complaining too.
Also the incentives of this setup are pretty screwed up. The advertising agency gets money as long as they are able to convince the advertiser that their services are worth it. But how do you really measure that? Sure, we have lots of fancy tracking technology, but not all consumers click ads to buy stuff. Whats the role of those purchases? Who knows. The agency will undoubtedly claim that all the sales were a direct result of an advertising company, and they have every incentive to say that. Do they really have any incentive to be completely honest about the effectiveness of their ads. I doubt it.
It's just that, the way the market is run, there is no incentive to be honest with the data. If the line has to go up, it has to go up, even if it's an imaginary rise.
Tracking ROI from advertising is pretty sophisticated. Ad agencies will be tracking conversions in most cases. Especially on FB, where you have people's real names and can track if someone who saw an ad bought through another platform.