Oversight Board: Facebook ‘Cross-Check’ System for VIPs Is ‘Flawed in Key Areas’

If Facebook’s parent firm Meta is going to run a class system, it can’t be clandestine anymore. The Facebook Oversight Board handed out(Opens in a new window) this advice on Tuesday, calling the company’s “cross-check” program for special review of posts by VIPs as “flawed in key areas.”

Cross-check, revealed in September 2021 in a Wall Street Journal(Opens in a new window) report that also labeled it “XCheck,” provides for extra human review of content shared on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram by specified high-profile users. Except that this review sometimes never happens.

The oversight board was set up by Facebook in May 2020(Opens in a new window) with what’s now reached $280 million in funding to provide some independent accountability for its policies and processes. This week, it judged cross-check to be unequal and opaque, lacking both clear criteria for which accounts qualify for cross-check and disclosure of this elite status to account owners and everybody else across Meta’s networks.

And because cross-check review takes an average of five days, cross-check lets rule-breaking posts from such boldface-name types as politicians and sports stars to remain fully visible. 

Special Treatment for Business Partners

The 57-page opinion (PDF(Opens in a new window)) discusses one such case in particular, a 2019 episode in which Brazilian soccer player Neymar rejected accusations of rape by a woman and shared WhatsApp conversations with her, including both her name and nude photos of her, leading to online harassment of the woman. 

The board’s opinion comments that “it is difficult to understand how non-consensual intimate imagery posted on an account with more than 100 million followers would not have risen to the front of the queue for rapid, high-level review if any system of prioritization had been in place.” 

And in this case, Meta not only waived one of its rules but then rewarded Neymar financially.

“The company ultimately disclosed that the only consequence was content removal, and that the normal penalty would have been account disabling,” the report states. “The Board notes that Meta later announced(Opens in a new window) it signed an economic deal with Neymar for him to ‘stream games exclusively on Facebook Gaming and share video content to his more than 166 million Instagram fans.’” 

Financial relationships definitely factor into cross-check, the board says: “According to Meta, one criterion, for example, is a specific amount of spending or revenue generated by an entity across Meta’s ‘family of apps,’ although the amount may vary over time.”

The board recommends that Meta rework cross-check to “prioritize expression that is important for human rights” over posts from business partners. The program should also be made much more transparent, with public criteria for inclusion, public markings of at least some categories of accounts covered by it (the board specified “state actors, political candidates and business partners”), published audits of how often cross-check works to catch incorrect content moderation, and a procedure to appeal cross-check decisions to the board itself. 

The Oversight Board’s individual content moderation rulings are binding, but advisory opinions like Tuesday’s are just that. In a November talk at the Web Summit conference, however, board member Alan Rusbridger said Meta takes its hints most of the time: “We’ve made about 130 recommendations, and in 70% of those cases Facebook had done what we asked, in part or in whole.”