[ojilles]

This doesn’t resonate with me at all: at those scales there are entire teams dedicated at tracking impact and outcomes of said spend on the advertiser side. Sure FB could lie about the metrics, but won’t be able to keep that up for long (matter of weeks).

[econcon]

If your CTR on ads drops for all advertisers on facebook. What can you do? How can you figure out of its just a technical glitch or someone purposely wrote bad code to create this situation where Facebook is benefiting at expense of every other advertiser..

Infact, Facebook can hire a residential IP service provider like Luminati and use bots to click their advertiser's landing pages in name of malware checks and bill them and later when caught say "ohh we made an error" then even your CTR or landing page tracking metrics are going to fail.

I come from adtech, so I know what is possible in this space and what my smart colleagues are capable of doing.