• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, November 8, 2022

Siding with Meta Platforms, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is urging a federal appeals court to block advertisers from proceeding with a class-action over allegedly inflated metrics.

In a friend-of-the-court brief filed Monday, the Chamber of Commerce asks the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse a decision U.S. District Court Judge James Donato's decision to certify a class of up to 3 million Facebook advertisers.

The business group argues that the advertisers don't have enough in common with each other to warrant class-action treatment.

“Meta showed individualized Potential Reach estimates to each of the more than three million class members, and each class member in turn placed its own individualized degree of weight on Meta’s estimates,” the business organization writes. “Deciding whether Meta made material misrepresentations to each class member and whether each class member relied on those alleged misrepresentations would thus require millions of individualized inquiries.”

Donato, who presides in San Francisco, ruled in March that DZ Reserve (which operated an e-commerce store operator) and Max Martialis (which sold weapons accessories) could proceed with fraud claims on behalf of all U.S. advertisers who used Facebook's Ad Manager or Power Editor to purchase ads on Facebook or Instagram after August 15, 2014.

The ruling came in a lawsuit dating to August 2018, when business owner Danielle Singer alleged that Facebook induced advertisers to purchase more ads -- and pay more for them -- by overstating the number of users who might see the ads. (Singer later dropped out of the litigation, leaving DZ Reserve and Max Martialis as lead plaintiffs.)

Facebook argued to Donato that the company's advertisers don't have enough in common with each other to be able to proceed as a group. Donato rejected Facebook's argument, ruling that the advertisers presented evidence that Facebook customers saw similar representations about the company's advertising reach and programs.

Meta recently urged the 9th Circuit to reverse that decision, arguing that the class certified by Donato covers millions of differently situated advertisers, ranging from small businesses to governments to large corporations. The company added that the advertisers “viewed different disclosures, had different objectives, and had access to vastly different information and context for the estimates they saw.”

Backing that request, the Chamber of Commerce claims that class-actions creates “hydraulic pressure” for defendants to settle, even if the claims have no merit.

DZ Reserve and Max Martialis are expected to make their written arguments to the appeals court in January.