A federal judge rejected Meta's attempt to dismiss a class-action lawsuit alleging it overcharged Facebook advertisers a collective $4B, ruling that the case can move forward. The suit, brought last year by South Carolina gym Iron Tribe Fitness, claims that from 2013 until at least 2017, Facebook said it was running a “second price” auction, where the winner pays no more than the second-highest bid, but actually ran a “blended price” auction, where the winner is charged somewhere between its own bid and the runner-up's. The gym alleges the switch came from a 2013 software bug that Facebook found in 2017 but only began a “slow rollout” of the fix. Judge Charles Breyer ruled that Facebook's statements telling advertisers they would be charged only the “minimum amount” they needed to pay were ambiguous enough that the case could not be resolved without more evidence.
