Facebook has reportedly given public figures special treatment by loosening—or simply not enforcing—restrictions that are supposed to apply to all of the social network’s 2.89 billion users.
The Wall Street Journal reports that “millions of celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users” are part of a program called XCheck whose members are either “rendered immune from enforcement actions” or allowed “to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.” The program has been around since at least 2019.
XCheck reportedly had nearly 5.8 million members in 2020, but many probably didn’t know they were part of an exclusive group. “Users aren’t generally told that they have been tagged for special treatment,” the Journal says, adding that “an internal guide to XCheck eligibility cites qualifications including being ‘newsworthy,’ ‘influential or popular’ or ‘PR risky.'”
It’s not hard to see how those broad guidelines would allow a secret group to grow to 5.8 million members—especially since the report also said that “most Facebook employees were able to add users into the XCheck system.” Yet documents obtained by the Journal indicate that far fewer employees were tasked with monitoring the posts of XCheck members for potential abuse.
This isn’t the first sign that some Facebook users were treated differently. BuzzFeed reported in February that the company regularly bent the rules for right-wing publications, for example, and The Verge reported in June that Facebook planned to stop offering politicians special treatment after it was criticized for leaving up policy-breaking content from former President Donald Trump.
The Journal says it received “an extensive array of internal Facebook communications” on which it based this report. (And others to be published later.) Those documents are said to be damning:
“Time and again, the documents show, in the US and overseas, Facebook’s own researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects, in areas including teen mental health, political discourse and human trafficking. Time and again, despite Congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn’t fix them.”
Those documents won’t remain secret for long. “At least some of the documents have been turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to Congress by a person seeking federal whistleblower protection, according to people familiar with the matter,” the Journal says. Then it’s up to US lawmakers to decide how to act upon the contents of the documents.
Facebook’s first director of monetization, Tim Kendall, told Congress in September 2020 that the company deliberately “rewired our brains so that we’re detached from reality and immersed in tribalism” so it could maximize its profits.
The Journal reports that Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said criticism of XCheck is fair but that it “was designed for an important reason: to create an additional step so we can accurately enforce policies on content that could require more understanding.”
UPDATE 3:45 p.m. ET:When asked to comment on the report, Facebook pointed us to tweets from Stone, which characterize the Journal story as “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.” He points to a 2018 Facebook blog post about its “Cross Check” system, which does just that.
The Journal story, however, argues that Facebook gives special treatment to certain high-profile users, by either looking the other way or not taking immediate action. Stone doesn’t directly address this, except to note that the company had a policy not to intervene in political speech, starting in 2019. Instead he notes that the Journal story is based on Facebook’s own documentation, and says changes to XCheck are “already underway at the company.”
