Meta may no longer favor well-known people over its own supervisory board

Meta has been criticized by its own oversight board for not moderating content from famous people fast enough. Meta would have a list of VIP profiles whose posts are only checked manually when they are reported.

The supervisory board writes that it researched Meta’s cross-checks program. The existence of this program became known last year. Cross-checks exclude certain famous people from automatic moderation. Instead, a Meta employee must manually review the content if it is reported or otherwise identified as a post that violates the platform’s terms. At first, Meta insisted that it did not discriminate between users.

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

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

Meta has not yet responded substantively to the report of the Supervisory Board. Meta CEO Nick Clegg writes on Twitter that Meta will respond to the oversight board’s conclusions and recommendations within 90 days.