Facebook keeps a secret list of VIPs who are allowed to break the rules without consequences: report

Facebook has a secret inner system that exempts high-profile celebrities, athletes, politicians, and journalists from its content material moderation requirements, in accordance to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

The program is known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” and it was initially developed as “a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts,” the Journal reported. It is meant to forestall “PR fires,” or the dangerous press that comes from an misguided enforcement motion taken towards individuals thought of VIPs.

The impact of this program is that there are “invisible elite tiers” inside Facebook that decide who should comply with the rules and who will get a particular exemption that enables them to break the rules without concern of penalties. Approximately 5.8 million high-profile Facebook customers had been protected against enforcement motion as of 2020, and solely 10% of the posts protected by XCheck are truly reviewed, in accordance to paperwork obtained by the Journal.

“At times, the documents show, XCheck has protected public figures whose posts contain harassment or incitement to violence, violations that would typically lead to sanctions for regular users,” the Journal reported. “In 2019, it allowed international soccer star Neymar to show nude photos of a woman, who had accused him of rape, to tens of millions of his fans before the content was removed by Facebook. Whitelisted accounts shared inflammatory claims that Facebook’s fact checkers deemed false, including that vaccines are deadly, that Hillary Clinton had covered up “pedophile rings,” and that then-President Donald Trump had called all refugees seeking asylum ‘animals.'”

“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” an inner firm assessment obtained by the paper stated. The assessment stated the program is “a breach of trust” and strengthened the level that “unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.”

A spokesman for Facebook informed the Journal that criticism of XCheck is honest, however that the system “was designed for an important reason: to create an additional step so we can accurately enforce policies on content that could require more understanding.”

He stated that Facebook is reviewing its insurance policies to tackle criticisms that the firm lacks the will or capacity to implement its content material moderation requirements pretty.

“A lot of this internal material is outdated information stitched together to create a narrative that glosses over the most important point: Facebook itself identified the issues with cross check and has been working to address them,” the spokesman stated.

But in accordance to the Journal, when it comes to the XCheck program, Facebook has misled the reviewers it put in place for oversight and accountability.

After the impartial Oversight Board Facebook established to assessment its content material moderation choices upheld the suspension of former President Donald Trump, the board requested that Facebook “report on the relative error rates and thematic consistency of determinations made through the cross check process compared with ordinary enforcement procedures.”

Facebook declined to accomplish that, telling the board “it’s not feasible to track this information” and referring the board to a 2018 weblog publish that acknowledged, “We remove content from Facebook, no matter who posts it, when it breaks our standards.”

But the XCheck paperwork reported by the Journal point out that declare shouldn’t be true.

The Oversight Board informed the Journal in a assertion that it “has expressed on multiple occasions its concern about the lack of transparency in Facebook’s content moderation processes, especially relating to the company’s inconsistent management of high-profile accounts.”