Reddit was sued by an unhappy advertiser who claims that internet giga-forum sold ads but provided no way to verify that real people were responsible for clicking on them.
The complaint PDF was filed this week in a US federal court in northern California on behalf of LevelFields, a Virginia-based investment research platform that relies on AI. It says the biz booked pay-per-click ads on the discussion site starting September 2022; as the name suggests, the advertiser pays a little bit for every click on one of its adverts.
That arrangement called for Reddit to use reasonable means to ensure that LevelField's ads were delivered to and clicked on by actual people rather than bots and the like. But according to the complaint, Reddit broke that contract.
naughty naughty reddit
Nonetheless, LevelFields's effort to obtain IP address data to verify the ads it was billed for went unfulfilled. The social media site "provided click logs without IP addresses," the complaint says. "Reddit represented that it was not able to provide IP addresses."
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The investment firm argues this is false "because Reddit has to know where traffic was coming from for security and monitoring purposes." And in the event that it doesn't, the biz argues, Reddit has failed to meet minimal standards for security and click monitoring on its platform. The plaintiffs aspire to have their claim certified as a class action.
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