(Bloomberg) -- Meta Platforms Inc. failed to stop a lawsuit accusing Facebook of overstating its advertising audience from being expanded to include more than 2 million small ad buyers.

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled on Tuesday that the case can proceed as a class action on behalf of small business owners and individuals who bought ads on Facebook or Instagram since Aug. 15, 2014. 

The decision is another setback for the social networking giant after court filings in 2021 revealed that its audience-measuring tool was known by high-ranking Facebook executives to be unreliable because it was skewed by fake and duplicate accounts.

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