Twitter Hit with Class Action Over Advertisements Shown to ‘Fake Accounts’ [UPDATE]

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Twitter, Inc. is the defendant in a proposed class action recently removed to Arkansas federal court that claims the social media platform has charged advertisers inflated prices to engage with “fake accounts.”

The lawsuit begins by citing a series of articles that reported that Twitter has suspended a grand total of 128 million “fake accounts” since the last quarter of 2017. These “bots, trolls and fake accounts,” according to the case, have skewed Twitter’s representations of its site traffic and active users and have allowed the company to charge inflated prices for advertising.

“By allowing fake accounts to generate fake Twitter activity or traffic, Twitter overestimates or inflates the actual amount of traffic on its social network, thereby enticing Self-Serve Advertisers to place ads, or Promote Tweets, on the Twitter platform,” the case reads.

The plaintiff, who the suit describes as a self-serve advertiser, says he relied upon Twitter’s representations that his ads would be marketed to “real people with real Twitter accounts” but instead spent over $2,000 to advertise to what he believes was a significant number of fraudulent accounts.

The lawsuit claims Twitter knowingly chose to “look the other way” instead of implementing systems to monitor the creation of fake accounts and detect “fake Engagements, and/or fake Follows, and/or fake Ad Clicks and/or fake impressions” on its platform. The plaintiff claims the process for weeding out fake accounts from real users is time-consuming, yet simple and “involves nothing more than what Twitter should have been doing all along.”

As a result of the defendant’s negligence, the case concludes, advertisers like the plaintiff have paid for “fake impressions” instead of advertising to real people and have generated revenue for the Twitter that it otherwise would not have received.