Samujjal Purkayastha, a former employee of Meta, has filed a complaint against the technology company before a court in the United Kingdom, accusing it of manipulating the advertising metrics related to Shops Ads in order to present a falsely improved performance.
Purkayastha began working at Meta in 2020 (when the company was still called Facebook) as a product manager on the Applied Artificial Intelligence Research team at Facebook. Subsequently, in 2022, he joined the Shops Ads team until his dismissal on February 19, 2025.
On August 20, Purkayastha filed the suit against Meta in the Central London Employment Tribunal. According to the document, Meta inflated the advertising return on investment metrics (ROAS) for Shops Ads, its advertising tool that enables advertisers to promote their products on Facebook and Instagram.
Specifically, the former Meta employee asserts that, during internal reviews conducted in early 2024, the company’s data scientists discovered that the ROAS for Shops Ads had been inflated by between 17% and 19%.
This discrepancy was due to the fact that Meta included shipping costs and taxes as part of sales, manipulating the figures to give the false impression that its performance exceeded that of other competitors such as Apple or Google. Purkayastha states that he had already noticed this practice by mid-2022.
Likewise, the former Meta employee states that he raised his concerns regarding these issues in multiple meetings with the company’s senior management. His claim includes a request for injunctive relief to regain his former position within the company.
According to the complaint, this manipulation did not occur with other Meta advertising products. As a result, advertisers were given a false impression that campaigns on Shops Ads were performing better than traditional advertisements.
In the document, Purkayastha states: “In addition to the fact that the ROAS performance metric was overestimated by almost a fifth, it meant that, rather than having exceeded our main objective, the Shops Ads team, in fact, did not achieve it once the figure was adjusted to account for artificial inflation.”
Furthermore, this alleged manipulation would also be part of a broader strategy by Meta to improve the performance of its ads, in response to the privacy updates that Apple implemented in 2021 through its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature.
Meta executives sought new sources of revenue that would be “resistant” to these privacy measures. Shops Ads were presented as the ideal solution, as they kept tracking and transactions within Meta’s own applications (Instagram and Facebook).
In order to make this new product appear more successful, Meta allegedly subsidized Shops Ads bids, sometimes by up to 100%, to ensure that they would be shown more frequently to users. This not only increased visibility, but also reinforced the illusion of solid performance and a high conversion rate.
In addition to the manipulation of bids, the complaint also claims that Meta engaged in poor practices regarding data tracking. Purkayastha asserts that the company implemented a mechanism called AEM2 which, unlike its predecessor, linked activity within Meta’s apps to browsing and purchasing on third-party sites by using personal identifiers such as email addresses or phone numbers.
Purkayastha believes that AEM2 may have circumvented Apple’s privacy restrictions, thereby recovering a significant portion of the data lost following Apple’s changes.
For the time being, a judge at the Central London Employment Tribunal has denied Purkayastha’s request for injunctive relief to recover his position. As for the case itself, a full hearing is expected to take place next year.
Regarding Meta, a spokesperson for the company stated that “the allegations related to the integrity of our advertising practices are baseless and we have complete confidence in our performance review processes.”
Photo: Depositphotos
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