Meta is no longer allowed to favor famous people from its own supervisory board

Meta has been reprimanded by its own supervisory board for not moderating content from famous people quickly enough. Meta would have a list of VIP profiles whose messages are only manually checked when reported.

The supervisory board writes that it has conducted research into Meta’s cross-checks program. The existence of this program became announced last year. Cross-checks ensure that certain famous people are excluded from automatic moderation. Instead, a Meta employee must manually review the content if it is reported or otherwise flagged as violating the platform’s terms. Meta initially firmly claimed that it made no distinction between users.

With the program, Meta wants to prevent content from famous people from being wrongly removed, which often causes a commotion. That is why Meta wants to manually check the messages of an unknown number of VIPs for malicious content. This concerns celebrities, but also politicians and journalists.

The Supervisory Board believes that harmful messages from people on this list remain online for far too long, in some cases days or even months after the messages were classified as harmful. It is also unclear who exactly is on the list and how they got there. The supervisory board advises Meta to reconsider this policy. The council wants the company to make this system more transparent and to check more quickly for harmful content.

Meta has not yet responded substantively to the supervisory board’s report. Meta CEO Nick Clegg writes on Twitter that Meta will respond to the conclusions and recommendations of the supervisory board within ninety days.