The Wall Street Journal reports that, according to a new filing in an ongoing lawsuit against Facebook, Facebook’s video viewership measurements—which drove the online publishing industry to try to shift en masse from written text to video, in pursuit of this new and apparently immense audience—were even more inflated than was previously known, and that Facebook was aware of the inflation and covered it up. Whole waves of writers lost their jobs so that text publishers could hire video teams, and then those video teams lost their jobs because text publishers didn’t really know how to do video, and because producing content for Facebook cannibalized their own readership, and because the numbers they were chasing were phony to begin with. And Mark Zuckerberg got richer. If you’re looking for a more honest, less lemming-like business strategy than joining forces with Zuckerberg, Friday’s Mega Millions drawing is now up to $900 million.
