Facebook has admitted it made an error in how it reported some stats about the number of users engaging with pages on its network.
Mark Zuckerberg's company confessed to the "bug" in a blog post on how it is changing its metrics and reporting for pages owned by businesses, media companies, sports clubs and other organisations.
"We know that having access to reliable metrics is important to the millions of partners who use our services to grow their businesses," the company wrote in the blog post. Later in the post it explained that Page Insights had not been reporting correctly.
"One summary number showing 7-day or 28-day organic page reach was miscalculated as a simple sum of daily reach instead of de-duplicating repeat visitors over those periods," the firm admitted. In short, this means one of the metrics was showing higher than it would have been.
The error in the system had been live on the administration panel for pages since May but the "vast majority" of the reach data displayed was unaffected, according to Facebook.
The social network said it would fix the bug "in the next few weeks" and also change how page reach is shown. "The de-duplicated 7-day summary in the overview dashboard will be 33 per cent lower on average and 28-day will be 55 per cent lower; data in other fields is unaffected," Facebook explained.
As part of a minor update to pages Facebook has also altered third party verification for pages and added a review process so its metrics "are clear and up to date" and introduced a new metrics blog.
However, in a tough time for Facebook where it's being criticised for its approach to dealing with fake news, this isn't the first time its metrics have proven wrong.
In September it was revealed that Facebook overestimated a key video metric.
The metric that it used to calculate the average time users spent watching videos had been artificially inflated because it was only counting in views of more than three seconds. Facebook said it would fix the problem.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
