Facebook Has VIP ‘Whitelist’ That Puts Elites Above Its Guidelines, Per WSJ
Image via Mercigod / Shutterstock.com
A new report by The Wall Street Journal has purported that Facebook makes use of a program that “whitelists” millions of VIP users, so they aren’t subject to the company’s standard moderation procedures.
Known as ‘XCheck’, the program allegedly creates special moderation settings for these accounts, both on Facebook as well as Instagram. As per internal documents seen by the Journal, users under the special program won’t have their content taken down immediately when flagged by the platform’s content moderators or artificial intelligence (AI) bots.
Instead, their posts may be allowed to remain live, and are re-routed into a separate moderation system. The report also claims that Facebook uses full-time, better-trained content moderators to attend to this VIP system.
In total, the report says there were at least 5.8 million VIP users in 2020, one of which is Brazilian soccer star Neymar.
An example of his supposed special moderation privileges was spotted in 2019, when he uploaded nude pictures of a woman who had accused him of rape to his Facebook feed.
While such content would normally be removed immediately, the report said XCheck protected his account, preventing the usual content moderators from removing his posts. This delay led to over 56 million Facebook and Instagram users seeing the images.
A spokesperson for Facebook, who spoke to the Journal, said that the social media platform was “phasing out” its VIP whitelist. According to CNBC, when pressed for more details, journalists were referred to a series of tweets by spokesperson Andy Stone.
Stone, quoting an article by Facebook in 2018, said that XCheck meant “some content from certain Pages or Profiles is given a second layer of review to make sure we’ve applied our policies correctly.”
“There aren’t two systems of justice; it’s an attempted safeguard against mistakes,” it said.
It’s unclear how many people are buying the explanation, especially after the Journal’s exposé. You can read more about it here.
WSJ today published a report about a FB system to give a second layer of review to content from high-profile Pages or Profiles to ensure correct application of our policies. If this secret program sounds familiar, it should. Here's what we said in 2018: https://t.co/eqErosKOrR.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) September 13, 2021
In 2018, we went on to say: “This typically applies to high profile, regularly visited Pages or pieces of content on Facebook so that they are not mistakenly removed or left up. Many media organizations’ Pages — from Channel 4 to The BBC and The Verge — are cross checked."
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) September 13, 2021
"For example, we have Cross Checked an American civil rights activist’s account to avoid mistakenly deleting instances of him raising awareness of hate speech he was encountering.”
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) September 13, 2021
Yet he relates those to issues with the cross-check program as a way of conflating the programs and misleading readers about the context of the remarks to Congress.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) September 13, 2021
But since 2019, when we, ourselves, promoted that the company would take this approach to politicians’ speech, there have been literally hundreds of news stories critical of our approach.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) September 13, 2021
The WSJ piece repeatedly cites Facebook's own documents pointing to the need for changes that are in fact already underway at the company. We have new teams, new resources and an overhaul of the process that is an existing work-stream at Facebook.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) September 13, 2021
[via CNBC, cover image via Mercigod / Shutterstock.com]
