For years, Facebook has operated a little-known program called “XCheck,” which allows celebrities, politicians, and other members of the American elite to circumvent the types of moderation policies to which the average user is subject. a new report of the Wall Street Journal reveals.
Although the company has often professed to treat everyone equally, the program suggests Facebook it has a tiered treatment system for users that, like the rest of American society, allows some powerful and well-to-do people to basically play by their own rules.
Also known as “cross-checking,” the program was apparently created as a “quality control” mechanism for moderation, intended to add an extra layer of review to incidents related to high-profile users. However, in reality, it has functionally functioned as a real means of application in these cases, thus avoiding unwanted “public relations fires”.
Since its inception, Facebook has struggled to define its moderation approach. Wwith about 2.8 billion users and surpassed by a continuous deluge of worrying content, misinformation, and other issues, the social media giant has spent the past few years hiring small armies of contractors to monitor and moderate the content that appears on its platform. Banning or punishing a user for their content becomes more complicated the more prominent they are.
So while kicking a celebrity or cheeky politician off their platform can be a big, risky venture, XCheck basically allows the company to stop or give up taking these enforcement measures, thus avoiding any controversy. .
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Apparently, this process has been transformed into a system that, today, protects “millions of VIP users” from the same type of scrutiny as regular and everyday users, according to the Wall Street Journal. Many of these users are “whitelisted,” basically making them immune to the app and allowing them to post inflammatory content, such as misinformation or “posts. [that] contain harassment or incitement to violence “, in the same way that a normal user would be able to uproot.
Among the recipients of these privileges was former President Donald Trump (before his 2-year suspension of the platform earlier this year), his son Donald Trump Jr., right-wing commentator Candace Owens and Senator Elizabeth Warren, among others. In most cases, people who are whitelisted or who have passed moderation do not know what is going on.
Facebook employees seem to know that XCheck has been problematic for quite some time. “We’re not really doing what we say we do publicly,” company researchers said in a 2019 note titled “The Political White List Contrasts Facebook’s Basic Principles.” “Unlike the rest of our community, these people can break our standards without any consequences.”
When asked for comments on the recent report, Facebook referred to Gizmodo comments made recently by the company’s head of communications, Andy Stone, via Twitter. Stone noted previous comments Facebook had made about its program, arguing that the program did not represent a bifurcated justice system, but rather an ongoing work that certainly needs some renewal.
“As we said in 2018,“ Cross-checking ”simply means that some content on certain pages or profiles receives a second layer of review to make sure we’ve implemented our policies correctly. “There are no two justice systems; it is an attempt to protect against mistakes.”
Stone further added that Facebook knew the program needed to be improved. “We know our application is not perfect and there are trade-offs between speed and accuracy,” Stone continued. “The WSJ piece repeatedly cites Facebook’s own documents that point to the need for changes that are in fact already underway in the company. We have new equipment, new resources and a review of the process which is an existing workflow on Facebook. “