From the Reuters article, it sounds like Facebook issued the updated SEC filing during the middle of their roadshow, and the analysts went over it and issued new forecasts to their paying customers.
Keep in mind that the underwriters are barred from making public forecasts during the lead up to an IPO.
Also keep in mind that the SEC filing was public, so anyone could go and read through it. So it's not like this was inside information. It was available to be consumed.
To me a lot of this falls within reasonable expectations of how openly subjective information can be communicated in the first place. Any communication involving judgment and ambiguity and anticipation is going to travel better and faster within some social network, and that's going to advantage some over others. I don't think the advantages are insurmountable, crowds are often wrong and anyone good at this stuff can find their way in. But I definitely see why other people find the whole thing fishy.
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001193125122...
The facts were that Facebook had less profit for Q1 2012 than Q1 2011, despite making 25% more revenue. It was blamed on lack of new revenue from the mobile space.
The "disadvantage" is to people who were blindly buying Facebook without doing due diligence.
The use of the Greenshoe tactic to make the price appear stable also seems to suggest they were targeting naive investors who would only be watching the share price after trading began, having no regard for who was buying them.
Please tell me I'm wrong.
As for Henry Blodget, while he may be biased in favor of sensationalism to garner pageviews, he seems to be in a unique position to comment on this sort of maneuvering to manipulate naive "web investors". He was once in the center of it, during the first Bubble. We cannot say the same for the WSJ's writers.
Please tell me I'm wrong.