Is there a giant social media platform with a secret program allowing the rich and famous of America to go against its rule system?
Facebook Has a VIP Program
“Xcheck,” is a small program operated by Facebook for many years now. According to the latest report from Wall Street Journal, this program permits celebrities, politicians, and other elite members of America to dodge every moderation policy they have in place, and every average user must follow.
However, the company has many times declared that everyone gets treated equally in their program. Nonetheless, this Facebook program suggested that they have this system to treat the elite much more differently than others, like the society in America does, allowing elite individuals to play according to their own rules.
“CrossCheck” is the other name for this program and got superficially created as a mechanism for quality control to moderate, meaning adding many layers of analysis to conflicts involved in high-profile users. Nonetheless, as a general rule, it has practically filled in as a method for evading genuine implementation in such cases—in this way keeping away from undesirable “PR fires.”
There have been conflicts and struggle since the beginning of Facebook regarding its moderation strategy. The platform has more than 2.8 billion users and gets overwhelmed with misinformation, worrisome content, and other issues. That is the reason why the social media platform spent the current years hiring small contractor groups to help them monitor and moderate all of the content that gets put on its platform. The more prominent a user is, the harder it becomes to ban or punish the content they post.
The fact is, kicking out a celebrity or a politician for being too boisterous from its platform is a huge risk. Essentially, XCheck sanctions the platform to postpone or forego taking any enforcement action to avoid the whole controversy.
The reports of the Wall Street Journal say this apparent process emerged into the system, protecting “millions of VIP users” from similar rules that other users would have to comply with.
Many elite users have gotten “whitelisted.” This basically means such users make them immune from enforcement. It allows these users to post anything they want, from misinformation to harassment or supporting violence and so on, such posts that other users would normally get kicked out from.
Many privileged users include Candace Owens (rightwing commentator), Doland Trump, and his son, Elizabeth Warren (Senator), and many others. In many cases, such whitelisted users get a pass on moderation, something at times they even do not know; they have this pass.
The Facebook employees know how questionable XCheck has been. In 2019, In a memo titled “The Political Whitelist Contradicts Facebook’s Core Stated Principles,” Facebook researchers said:
“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly…Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.”
As Facebook got asked about this recent report, Andy Stone, the communication officer of Facebook made a comment on Twitter, arguing how the program is not what others say about the system is unjust:
“As we said in 2018: “‘Cross-check’ simply means that 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.”
Furthermore, Stone added:
“We know our enforcement is not perfect and there are tradeoffs between speed and accuracy,” Stone went on. “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.”
